


THE PARTING GLASS

by spicyshimmy



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, M/M, Other, Post-Game(s), Pre-Slash, Slash, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-02 00:17:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 39,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post ME3 fic. Highly speculative. SPOILERS! In the aftermath of Shepard's choice, Steve Cortez and James Vega figure out what it means to be alive in London, Kaidan Alenko figures out what it means to be alive at all, and Garrus Vakarian figures out someone else might just be alive, too. <i>The night before Commander Shepard defeated the Reapers, Garrus brought two bottles to Commander’s quarters on the Normandy. After all, just one bottle wouldn’t be right for both of them. The real pity was not being able to drink the same stuff, even if those standards were splitting hairs the way a sniper split targets.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE

**PROLOGUE**

The night before Commander Shepard defeated the Reapers, Garrus brought two bottles to Commander’s quarters on the Normandy. After all, just one bottle wouldn’t be right for both of them. The real pity was not being able to drink the same stuff, even if those standards _were_ splitting hairs the way a sniper split targets.

Humans thought big. Turians _were_ big. And it was about time for Shepard to take him up on an old offer.

They never shared that drink.

The door was shut but even the airlock seal couldn’t keep out the noise coming from inside; Garrus turned before he got too close—even if neither of the men inside would hear him, all things considered.

James Vega would have said _I’ll have what he’s having_ , in a colloquial and potentially humorous fashion—a new twist on an old line, as infelicitous as it was apropos of…something. But James Vega was drinking alone, and Garrus didn’t plan on doing the same. Not that night. Maybe not any other.

He left the brandy with Dr. Chakwas.

It was allegedly her favorite.

*

Everybody says: _it’s a cliché for a reason_. Whether that reason’s truth or people just lack imagination, it doesn’t matter.

James Vega thought he’d have more time with Commander Shepard. And after that, brand new tattoo on his shoulders making him hold them different, he’d be able to tell the truth from the cliché. Not just pick the pieces apart, either—he’d _blow them_ apart.

Just like Shepard.

Crazy guy.

But the morning after they defeated the Reapers—with a little help, a lot of running around the galaxy, diplomacy at its finest, and none of it possible without Shepard knowing how to play the game—the man in question wasn’t there to see the whole thing go down.

He was already gone.

Not ‘in a better place.’ _Gone_. That was no cliché, and James wasn’t going to be the one to dress it up in formal-wear to meet whatever council it had to—for permission, for clearance, for show.

While the sky lit up way too bright—brighter than the sun ever managed, all comm devices going down, static giving way to _natural sound_ , not _even_ static anymore but real fucking blackness, the ground itself shaking from distant blasts. Before everything went still. Right there, right then, at the end of everything, the cliché happened.

And it felt pretty real.

Diana Allers was all right. They’d made passes at each other before, a dance James knew well, even if there was more duck-and-weave involved, way more feinted punches than ones that actually landed, than he liked.

‘One of these days, James,’ Shepard told him once. ‘you might have to learn _the dance_ is as much about when you _don’t_ as when you _do_.’

‘You see me dancing right now, Loco?’ James had asked.

That wasn’t it.

‘So,’ Diana said. Her voice was small but it was too loud, nothing else to shield it from the present—much less the future—and James’s big heartbeat was thudding in his chest, his breathing coming in too hard. Same as always. ‘That was… _Damn_ it. I can’t believe I wasn’t covering the story. I was having end-of-the-world sex with a soldier instead.’

‘Maybe that _is_ the story, ace,’ James replied.

She’d been sweating before. James wasn’t going to flatter himself about that. He did up his uniform again and she combed her fingers through her hair, then touched the back of his neck, somewhere too high above the collar to know where the tattoo was. It was just skin there. Only skin.

*

Steve didn’t have anybody to send one last radio transmission to.

After that, all transmissions ended.

He didn’t know what he was hearing, what he wasn’t hearing. Sweat was in his eyes and he wasn’t actually flying, so he couldn’t blink past it. He couldn’t see a damn thing.

It wasn’t like a crash-landing. Not that he would’ve told anybody this, but he was getting too old for those. Being blindsided was one thing but heading to that point everyone knew was coming—then flying past it— _that_ was different.

He pushed himself off the dash, arms beat up, elbow bleeding, but other than that he was OK, depending on the definition. The ship wasn’t. None of the familiar lights was on, not even flashing.

Disappointment. Relief. Nothing passed before his eyes, no memories of Robert that took shape in front of him, just a blank darkness that cleared when he wiped his hand over his eyes. He was thinking about him, sure, but he always did. Not because it kept him alive. Maybe because it kept _Steve_ alive.

‘Vega!’ he heard himself shouting. ‘Hey, Vega—you out there?’

Something was burning. Rubber, tar, metal, all that stuff. Wires were down and hissing brightly, spitting, snapping coils; that was enough to light his way through the hall, past Allers’ overturned cameras, banging his toe on the lens. It shattered.

He could see them in a busted up airlock, through the white sparks.

Being young again would’ve been nice, Steve thought, already moving on to check the armory, to check for survivors, for assets.

But at least he still had the chance to be old some more.

*

There was a moment—Kaidan definitely saw it in his eyes—when Shepard didn’t want to bring him along for the final ride.

Actually, there were a lot of moments like that. Just replace ‘final’ with ‘dangerous’ and there you had it. But they were soldiers, brothers in arms first, _in_ each other’s arms second. They didn’t have to insult each other that way.

Kaidan was relieved.

Kaidan was terrified.

That was what it meant to be themselves, so there they were. First kisses, last kisses, it was all in the past. They’d known the terms since the beginning: _while it lasted_.

They’d just…do the same as they always did, because the worst part was always having to pretend it couldn’t be something random, stray shrapnel before the end, that Shepard’s story—his legend—could stop short in the middle and they’d have to go on without him. And they _would_ go on without him.

 _I’m not ready for that_ , Kaidan thought. _Hell, I’m not ready for this._ But when he asked himself, _Is Shepard?_ all that came back was the beginnings of an old headache, and each fired round was only making it worse.

He’d given up on thinking about survival. Now, he just wanted to be the first to die.

He thought maybe he’d understand Shepard then, the places he’d been, the places he couldn’t remember, while Kaidan was somewhere else, feeling him like a soldier’s phantom limb, survivor’s guilt and survivor’s luck.

Kaidan was ready. Relieved and terrified had nothing to do with it. That night, they were dying in London, a suicide mission in more than name only.

He thought, _there’s a lot of blood_.

*

No more damn consequences, Shepard thought. Destroy the synthetics; destroy himself. No one could say he didn’t understand the terms—intimate, personal, and now, forever.

He’d already died once. He was done with hoping, but maybe he’d be able to enjoy the best part about it the second time around. 


	2. VEGA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The worst part for James is that there's no _cerveza_.

‘The worst part,’ James told the Asari volunteer, ‘is that there’s no _cerveza_.’

The Asari laughed. She didn’t actually think it was the worst part—and she got the same post-war look in her eyes everybody was wearing these days, along with the black armbands. James knew what she was thinking—more like _who_ she was thinking about. Somebody important, not ready yet to say their name out loud. Or maybe her mind was headed toward a home planet. Or maybe she was telling herself how great it was and how terrible it was that they just didn’t know—all those people out there, all those systems, all those possibilities.

They could live in dumb hope forever if they wanted to, but _dumb hope_ went with drinking like lime went with tequila. It always needed a _little_ something to balance it out.

Piccadilly Circus Memorial Field Hospital was full, as always. James shifted the weight of his rations bag from one side to the other—it wasn’t that heavy, and wasn’t that the problem?—and didn’t bother to shield his eyes, looking down over the rows of tents and the rows of cots.

He’d helped put some of those up.

He’d also helped tear some of the city down.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Post-war, people could block out the stuff that didn’t help with rebuilding, at least for a while. Like the Asari volunteer—nurse or whatever she was, since whatever she used to be didn’t count anymore—someone whose name James didn’t know and didn’t care to. She’d seen the dog tags he was still sporting, so she knew him about as well as anybody else did: soldier, big one, probably still clinging to the past, not ready to shake it off. Not ready to stop hanging around the field hospitals looking for survivors.

‘Guess I’ve overstayed my welcome,’ James added, not bothering to clear his throat. ‘You’ll tell me if somebody by that name _does_ show up, all right?’

‘Or let you know if I come across some _cerveza_ ,’ the Asari replied.

That was a good one, James thought. He even chuckled, canned food tucked under one arm, making his way past Leicester Square—what was left of it—and toward the National Gallery Shelter, blown out shell of a building that at least gave some people a roof over their heads. Or half a roof.

It was still better than nothing.

And it was way better than _no roof_ , especially when it rained, although at least the stuff coming down wasn’t black anymore.

London. James had heard stories, enough to guess the weather wouldn’t be his thing. Now he _knew_ it wasn’t. The food wasn’t so hot, either, even if it did stand up to what they had back on the Normandy.

There it was—the old grit in his throat, something he could blame on how bad the air was directly over the city. Blow up enough mass relays and the atmosphere was bound to get dense; blow up enough everything else and you’d be coughing it up for days, weeks, even months. ‘Now you’ve finally got an excuse for being short of breath—is that what you’re trying to tell me, Vega?’ Cortez asked, in those early days, when they still hadn’t figured out if the stuff was going to kill them or not.

This time, James _did_ clear his throat. It worked. Whatever was lodged in the back there shook free, right as he stepped clear of a couple of Turians trying to figure out how three fingers were supposed to get a decent grip on their _hammers_.

Garrus had been the same way. The guy knew it wasn’t going to happen. Some people’d up and died because the life that came after just wasn’t what they were meant to be living—only that kind of practicality wasn’t the same as the stuff they had now, putting their heads down and eating whatever they could, sleeping whenever they could, breathing however they could.

Considering the quality of air was tighter than it was up in space before they had time to depressurize—or decontaminate—that was saying a lot.

James put the goods down on the table, a real fancy thing from a point in history so long before synthetics that it was almost funny to see it still in mostly one piece. There it stood, with a collection of salvaged tech, mostly garbage, and his rations spread out over the top, one scorch mark on a wobbly leg, but the rest of it intact. There was the old aquarium VI that didn’t work anymore next to a busted up replica of the Normandy—the only two things that hadn’t broken in the final crash.

As for the fish in the tank—obviously, they’d died.

And if they hadn’t, somebody would’ve eaten them before too long.

James popped one of the tabs on his dinner, peeling the lid back. Sometimes he sniffed it first just to prove it didn’t bother him and sometimes he didn’t.

This was a ‘didn’t’ kind of night.

‘Damn,’ he said.

‘That good, huh?’ Cortez asked. There _he_ stood, not in the doorway like old times because there weren’t any doorways; stations got marked off with separators, but it didn’t do much for keeping out the snoring at night, temporary accommodations until things got stable again.

Then again, that covered everything.

‘Even better,’ James replied. ‘Finger-licking good, Esteban. You here for another free meal?’

‘What else?’ Cortez stepped inside, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, wearing a look that was close to whatever the Asari volunteer had on earlier. Maybe it was just one of those days. Feeling too much led to thinking too much—and when you couldn’t even buy a guy a drink to take his mind off things, they got these crazy ideas like rashes, like allergies, making it that much harder to breathe. They went into relief efforts as a _grief counselor_ , of all the things, listening to everybody’s sob stories they couldn’t keep inside.

James rolled his shoulders out. The vertebrae at the back of his neck popped above the tattoo. ‘A’right. Pick your poison.’

‘Already have,’ Cortez said.

He’d offered once—to hear James out, whatever he had to get off his chest. _It’s a lot for anybody to deal with,_ he’d said, turning serious, leaning forward with his hands together, thumb rubbing his knuckles and the thin skin spread between, like little valleys on unknown soil. His sleeves were rolled up then, too, and James could’ve asked…well, _anything_. Not the big questions, the ones nobody could answer, but the stuff like _What’s a pilot do when he can’t fly, anyway?_ or _What’s a soldier do when the war’s over, for that matter?_ That stuff sounded good in theory, looked better on paper, but it was harder to swallow than the ash and more dangerous than a live wire sparking loose in a ship’s armory.

So he’d shrugged, leaning back. ‘If wishes were fishes, Esteban…’ he’d said.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Cortez hadn’t pulled away after, not for a while. ‘You’d be shooting ‘em right in the barrel; _I know_.’

James’s dog-tags jingled. They were made to withstand all kinds of conditions, all temperatures—all kinds of heat—and that was how the relief effort had managed to identify so many of the survivors in the days after the synthetics were destroyed. It was how they managed to identify so many of the casualties, too, to put names on all the deaths.

Civilians were a different issue. Most of them had evacuated, or tried. Plenty hadn’t. Now they were sharing the same shelters, most of the same jobs, night duties and the shell-shocked sitting on cots, a heavy cloud still hanging over the dark sky. That sort of thing.

James ate, dog-tags settled again. No matter how much time he had to ‘adjust,’ there was no way he’d get used to the shuffle of natural unrest. No VIs humming, no constant buzz from strip lighting, nothing—and into the void it left came the coughing, shifting, fabric on fabric, snoring, muted conversation, throats cleared, crying sometimes, quiet and muffled by an arm or a pillow or not even, the stuff that _came out_ because it had to go _somewhere_. It couldn’t stay inside. _That_ was the real poison.

James wiped the sweat off the back of his neck, staring at the far wall and the hole in it, sheeted over by tarp, a piece too small to be useful anywhere else. He could hear Cortez tucking in, the pop of the tab accompanied by the same short sigh after the first bite.

That was one cool thing about Esteban. He listened to a lot of people and he was _probably_ good at it, considering how they all looked at him after, but when it came to pretending everything smelled and tasted the way it used to, he never went in for it.

They both knew it wasn’t prettier than it looked.

‘That good, huh?’ James asked.

‘Even better,’ Cortez replied.

‘Yeah, well. You take another guy’s food all the time, you don’t get to complain about what’s cooking.’ James bit off a piece of jerky—looked and felt like rubber, tasted even worse—and spent the next minute just chewing. They were all just chewing, but jawing it up meant listening less to the sounds around him and less to his own thoughts and more to the creak of his joints. It was all locked up inside. And that was better than the alternative.

‘Way I remember it, Mr. Vega, you used to be better at idle conversation.’ Cortez wiped something from the corner of his mouth with his thumb, tendons in his forearm shifting. James wasn’t looking. ‘In fact, _way I remember it_ , a guy couldn’t hang out in Purgatory without hearing you losing at cards all the way out in Bay E28.’

‘I didn’t _lose_ ,’ James said. ‘I was just…keeping up morale. Some people do that different, Esteban.’

‘Some people do it by taking their clothes off round after round?’ Cortez asked. ‘Hey, don’t look at me. That’d keep up _my_ morale. Should’ve dealt myself in. Wish I had.’

‘I didn’t lose,’ James said again.

‘You’re right.’ Cortez was leaning forward again, the way James had when he got his N7 ink. Now it was just a relic—like the aquarium VI on his _road-cocoa_ table, or whatever it was Cortez’d called it. ‘We didn’t lose.’

James stared at that hole in the wall.

Actually, for a while after everything, when he’d been busted up helping pull some guys out of the wreckage—once all the ships in earth’s orbit came crashing down, Normandy included—that old tattoo’d snagged him an infection, coming in hot like a fever. He sweated it out after a day, less, and the ink was still there like it’d never given him hell in the first place. But it wasn’t easy to see in the mirror, especially when there weren’t too many of those hanging around, most of them broken during all the fighting. Nothing but shards to go by now.

He knew it didn’t mean the thing wasn’t on him anymore. Just because he couldn’t see it on the regular didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Cortez, for example. _He_ did his thing all day long and still turned up again at the end of it, just like bad credit. Out of sight and out of mind, but not always out of time _or_ out of luck.

Sometimes out of sight wasn’t _even_ out of mind.

James needed a drink.

Contraband was going to end up a pretty big thing sooner or later—and always too soon. James had already knocked some local heads together over rumors of a black market starting up in the underground, London’s old tunnels, what _hadn’t_ caved in.

No matter what they’d been through, people had to be smart. Too damn smart for their own good. Smart enough that _other_ people were going to die because of it—how all the best plans worked, _apparently_.

‘You know, I’ve seen a lot of guys tear themselves apart over not talking about stuff,’ Cortez said. ‘I was one of ‘em.’

‘‘Stuff,’’ James repeated.

‘Yeah, ‘stuff,’’ Cortez replied. ‘You wanna make something out of it? You _itching_ for that fight again?’

James looked up and they looked at each other, and there wasn’t anything angry in Cortez’s mouth like James expected, no challenge in his eyes. It was an honest question, which James’d always figured was one of those oxymorons—something that couldn’t survive in the real world, much less whole damn galaxies of real worlds.

But for now, maybe forever, all they had was this one. It was like finding out a tee’d shrunk in the wash and now it was way too small, wrinkling and pulling at the seams, neck ripping when you tugged it on.

‘Hey,’ Cortez said. ‘That wasn’t a _let’s take this outside_ suggestion or anything. Just so you know.’

‘I know,’ James said. ‘Shit, Esteban, I fucking _know_.’

It felt good to curse like that, stuff that would’ve flagged him with a demerit back when _pendejada_ like _demerits_ counted. If they ever counted.

James didn’t say anything else. Cortez didn’t either. And he left to tuck in for the night pretty soon after, not pressing his advantage, not pressing his luck, which was why he was the pilot and James was the soldier. Different skill-sets. Different instincts. Different personalities and different training. It was the natural stuff, the unnatural stuff, how James still hadn’t learned that thing Shepard had, that thing Shepard was trying to teach him: how not to burn up from both ends all night long.

But James didn’t know where there was room for raw muscle in finesse.

A weapon was only as good as whatever it was shooting at—as much as the hand doing all the shooting. Besides, he never _could_ take advice from somebody who didn’t live by the same rules he was laying down.

James kicked up his legs, knees bent, lying back on his cot. If he didn’t tuck his knees in, his feet’d dangle over the edge. He’d put this bed together, along with a whole lot more. Unlike a Turian, he knew how to use a hammer to build stuff _and_ tear it down again. ‘Now, this has _two_ ends,’ he remembered explaining. ‘One that looks like the front of your face and one that looks like the back of your head. Smash with the front, pull with the back. Shit, maybe you guys’d be better off just using your heads for the job. You don’t scar easy, right? Tough Turian skin? You gonna unleash some kinda toxin to make me shut up now?’

The banter’d been nothing but one-sided. A few of them had scars, but not anything big enough, bad enough, to warrant the nickname.

*


	3. CORTEZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James Vega plays with some refugee kids like he's a dinosaur, and some fossils get dug up.

It wasn’t a clear day. Steve didn’t wake up expecting one.

There was a taste in his mouth that was gone once he ate something, once he got his routine started—once he headed over to Piccadilly Circus Memorial Field Hospital to see what he could help out with. There were a couple of guys he thought of as _his guys_ , still getting through the tough stuff—like somehow what they’d fought for, how hard they’d fought, wasn’t _the tough stuff_ already—and sometimes they said it was good to see him again.

Sometimes they didn’t.

‘Good to see you again,’ he said, because they couldn’t take it for granted.

He knew he wasn’t their squadmate, their superior, _their guy,_ so why he thought of them as _his_ had as much to do with what he needed as it had to do with what _they_ needed.

So long as he recognized it—and he did—then he could think of it as mutual.

That wasn’t something they had too many chances for, not even before everything.

It wasn’t that anyone knew how to answer that question about humanity, either. And it was important they kept to the small stuff instead of the bigger issues—names, memories, little things and all of them personal. Favorite foods. What they’d eat if they could. Where they were from. Remembering how to want stuff again, step by step, without having to ask themselves, is the risk worth taking?

If they could answer those questions, thumbing over their dog-tags, skin on metal, looking down at their hands or looking out past Steve’s shoulder but getting it—understanding where they were in the present—then it was a good day, even if it wasn’t a clear one.

Steve helped out with the bandages sometimes, too. With holding somebody down, hooking his arms under their armpits and feeling them sweat against his wrists. Those were also what he thought of as the good days.

And Vega was good at it. Even better at keeping the kids distracted when it was time for a checkup, but he kept acting like he wasn’t around, like he hadn’t spent all day in Piccadilly, like he _wasn’t_ there with a bunch of fugees even now, letting them climb all over him and mess up his hair.

‘Way I hear it, Mr. Vega, you’re on your way to becoming London’s very own friendly dinosaur,’ Steve said, setting up next to a few crates for lunch. One of the orphans was pulling on Vega’s ears. ‘Kind of like a mascot, when you think about it. Pretty impressive, too.’

‘What can I say?’ Vega didn’t shake her off. ‘Go big or get out of town.’

‘I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes,’ Steve said.

‘Whatever,’ Vega said, twisting underneath the kid’s expert hold. ‘I’m just benchpressing these little dudes. You _know_ they’re heavier than they look.’

 _So’s a lot of stuff_ , Steve thought, but he didn’t say it.

‘That’s right,’ Vega added. ‘You guys are helping _me_ out here, not the other way ‘round. Now hold still or I’m gonna drop you, and it’s a _long_ way down from all the way up here.’

At least he wasn’t teaching them Spanish—the Vega dictionary version, from _cerveza_ to _pendejo_ and all the curses in between.

‘Just leave it, all right?’ Vega had said once, too late at night, way past curfew, standing out back of the gallery while he did chin-ups on a bent lamppost. Whether or not he’d bent it himself, Steve had no idea. ‘These kids don’t even have— They’re gonna learn it _sometime_. Better they figure it out fast, _now_ , _and_ know how to use it.’

After that, he cleaned up his act.

Mostly.

Steve’s lunch tasted like reconstituted waste, but the kids were eating theirs, putting it _away_ whenever Vega tore into something. Steve noticed that. They just wanted to be like him. Then Vega noticed him noticing it and the moment was ruined, just like anything else when you drew too much attention to it. Vega shrugged one big shoulder, sweat underneath the pits of his tee. It’d been white once, but like everything else, it’d changed from what it used to be. Not to something _worse_ , but to something different.

‘We’re eating _proteins_ ,’ one of the kids said. ‘Stole it to keep our strength up in the wild.’

‘Nice one, Vega,’ Steve said. ‘You’re teaching them some _real_ life lessons here.’

Vega grinned, showing teeth. Like a dinosaur—but if it was for Steve’s sake or for the kids or both, or because Vega was just doing it because he was Vega, it was too close of a call. Steve didn’t have enough experience reading people like engines yet. All he knew was Vega would be Vega whether somebody loved it or not.

At least somebody was having fun. Somebody big—and a lot of little somebodies with him. The kids were using him like his body was a new kind of battlefield, probably not thinking the word itself, but when they stepped on him he just flexed and held it, down on his back between two tarped-up grates, teaching them how to walk over a person without them even feeling it.

‘Course, you wouldn’t want to try this on somebody like Esteban over there,’ Vega added. ‘You gotta figure out first who’s tough and who isn’t.’ Steve couldn’t see his face, but he knew he was tapping himself on the temple when he continued, ‘It ain’t all about muscle all the time. Sometimes it’s about using your head, too. You got that, _ninita_? I’m telling you, don’t step on anybody scrawny like Esteban. He can’t take it.’ 

‘Aw, Mr. Vega, you _do_ care,’ Steve said, leaning back. He watched as Vega straightened into a sit-up with a grunt, as the kids scattered laughing, running to their crates to hide. Vega’s wrinkled tee rolled up and he pulled it down, fabric straining at the shoulders.

If he was doing his own laundry, that’d explain a lot of the shrinking. Hard to imagine anybody getting bigger instead of smaller these days.

 _Just dump the stuff in with the rest of mine_ , Steve remembered offering a few weeks back. _It’s cool. A couple more dirty t-shirts won’t make much of a difference, and since that’s_ all _you wear…_

 _Uh-huh_ , Vega’d replied, which meant _no w_ ay in marine language, apparently.

Go figure.

He’d been distracted at the time, not even wearing one of his t-shirts, sweating it out getting a wall repaired with a bunch of Turians who, he’d said, weren’t _even_ doing the best with what they’d been given. ‘Three goddamn fingers, man,’ he’d said, wiping his forehead with his t-shirt, then heading back inside the shelter. ‘Three. Goddamn. Fingers.’

Sure, Steve agreed. They were good at some things, okay at others, terrible at the rest. Same as everyone else around here. And not _everyone_ had the same advantages.

‘Ready or not, you’d _better_ be ready,’ Vega said, finishing off his protein. Rations might’ve been getting slimmer, but Vega wasn’t. He was just about the only soldier post-war Steve knew who’d actually bulked up.

‘You gonna roar like a dinosaur?’ Steve asked.

‘Hey,’ Vega replied. ‘Dinosaurs don’t _roar_ , OK? So _no_ , I am _not_ gonna do that.’

It’d been a long time. Steve laughed and Vega did too, even the taste of lunch not enough to sour it. But the Asari volunteer with the black armband clearing her throat next to Steve put the lid on that, whatever it was, something over so fast Steve didn’t have time to gauge its structure, much less its meaning.

He knew her not by name but by sight, passing her sometimes when his volunteer shift at Piccadilly was over and he headed back to check in at the National Gallery, some of the PTSD going on in there just as bad as whatever Steve saw in the field hospitals. The Asari had afternoon duty, early evening maybe, and Steve didn’t have to know people—people _or_ aliens—as well as he knew models and makes to realize she knew Vega too.

Then again, a lot of people knew Vega.

Not always for bad reasons. Sometimes just for awkward ones.

‘Hey,’ Vega said. He sounded surprised. ‘Something I can do you for?’

‘It might not be anything,’ the Asari said, ‘you know that already—but you told me to alert you if anyone came through with any of those names you mentioned.’

‘Names, huh?’ Steve asked, but there was something in his stomach and it wasn’t the proteins from lunch, tacky leather that left grit in his throat on the way down, that’d form a hard lump anyway. This just helped it tighten up quicker.

‘Which name is it?’ When Vega stepped forward, Steve was sitting at the right height to hear something pop in his knee—and to get caught in his shadow, big as it was, cutting off the hazy sunlight. He _wasn’t_ at the right height to see Vega’s face, just his elbow, the vein on the inside and one of the muscles—some flexor or other—twitching once, visibly. ‘Which one?’

The Asari pulled out a clipboard, checking it over—twice—which made sense, given the guy bearing down on her, unfortunately making the moment that much more intense.

But she knew her stuff. She’d seen more than they’d ever know. She held her ground, her eyes scanning the info, confirming something for herself that she probably didn’t need to. Then she nodded, because she’d never _actually_ doubted what she’d find there.

‘He finally woke up this morning, and we got a name from him. He was wearing one of those…commemorative dog-tags they issued; we’ve seen a lot of them, enough to know not to hope. Of course, it said Shepard on the back, so we couldn’t ID him until—’

‘Hey,’ Vega said. ‘Which. Name. Is it?’

‘Alenko,’ the Asari replied. ‘Major Kaidan Alenko.’

*


	4. VEGA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan Alenko isn't Commander Shepard.

He wasn’t Shepard.

But if the Normandy crew took a shot for every time they thought something like that, then even James’d be drunk by breakfast.

Hell, the guy had to deal with that one on the regular, what with…everything. James could still remember the time when his N7 tattoo was _finally_ finished and he headed back from the Holding Docks to the ship. ‘Yo, Esteban,’ he’d said, not even swaying on his feet. ‘Where’s Commander Loco at? I wanna show him my new _ink_.’

‘You’re a little too late for that,’ Cortez replied, checking some orders or whatever on a bleeping screen. James couldn’t even see the time, squinting into the light. ‘Commander Shepard has…left the Normandy. He’s on a date. Might’ve been able to catch him if you’d acted sooner, though.’

‘Nah, I’ll just show him in the morning,’ James said, then, ‘wait. _Seriously?_ On a _date?_ With— Don’t _tell_ me he’s stealing Joker’s virtual reality girl. ‘Cause that shit just ain’t right.’

‘Like I said…’ Cortez shut off the touchpad screen and some of the whirring that filled the bay powered down with it. Everything was way too close to too dark and too quiet for James’s taste, because nobody’d be able to see the tattoo in all its glory this way. Nobody was even looking. Meanwhile, the skin was still stinging under his civvies. ‘You’re a _little_ too late, Mr. Vega. Hell—seems like we both are.’

‘You in one of those weird moods? I get it,’ James said. ‘I get it.’ He lifted his hand over his shoulder, then dropped off to bed, sleeping on his stomach that night instead of on his back.

Maybe he did get it and maybe he didn’t. That was a long time ago, but when it turned out the date in question was _Major Alenko_ , rumor around the Normandy—Daniels and Donnelly ran their mouths like crazy—was that they didn’t get back until _late_ had already turned into _early_.

One of those things James never said, as many times as he thought it, was _Hey, Loco. Didn’t know you were_ that _crazy._

James shook out his arms, elbows jittery to his fingertips, on his way past the rows of cots, past the first few tents where the real bad cases were kept, then into the ICU—if you could call it that—where the doctors and their nurses worked round the clock until they needed some TLC, themselves.

For whatever reason, James hadn’t been down that way much. He knew some guys… But everybody _knew some guys_. They’d get out, get on their feet again, show up to help the Turians screw in a light bulb, and the only thing James’d have say to that was, _It’s about damn time. These guys need all the help they can get_.

Some of the cots had names.

Some didn’t.

The thing was, they’d started labeling all the John Does and Jane Does _John Shepard_ and _Jane Shepard_. The names that weren’t names stared up at James as he passed by, doing his best not to bump into any of them or the cots they belonged to.

Cortez was still there at his back and nobody said hey to them, friendly or not, and nobody was shouting, and everything was quiet as wearing a helmet in an airlock—until the chinpiece cut into the throat and started to choke you. James knew he was breathing heavy; he was always breathing heavy. But when that was the only sound you could hear, not even a hum in the distance to keep you company, you got desperate for something, _anything_ , a groan or a cough or a whimper or a _screw you_.

‘It was just a hunch, Esteban,’ James said, cracking his neck as they followed that Asari for what felt like miles of casualties. ‘Not _even_ a hunch. Just figured maybe, I dunno, somebody might turn up _sometime_.’

‘ _Somebody_ ,’ Cortez repeated.

‘Yeah, _somebody_ ,’ James said. He remembered the night before, Cortez small and so damn spunky, words like sparring but still too much duck and weave. ‘Why—you wanna make something out of it?’

‘Kaidan Alenko.’ The Asari came to a stop in front of one of the beds and James asked himself, did he help set that one up? What did it matter? Was it even something he owed Shepard or were all bets off because the stakes had changed—or were all bets still on forever because one of the players was MIA without settling the score?

Dead. Dead _and_ gone _._ The only thing that could make one word lonelier was another word showing up to make it sound even worse. James let out one of his heavy breaths only to find Cortez was already moving, already at the bed, not fast at all—but nice and easy, steady and smooth, the way he flew. Or the way he used to.

‘Major, you have visitors,’ the Asari said.

Obviously.

James hung back so he didn’t bump the cot. The name on the plaque had been crossed out, from _John Shepard_ to _Kaidan Alenko_ , something recent.

There was that damn grit again. It had to be the stuff they were eating. It just didn’t go down, staying in the throat all day. And meanwhile, nobody could swallow.

‘Don’t…’ Alenko’s voice said, definitely his but definitely shaky, like protesting was part of an old routine.

Wake up; get called major; wince.

His face’d been patched with some bandages but it was still recognizable as _his face_ underneath ‘em. Nothing too bad, then, with some pretty serious bruising around the eyes, body propped up and sitting stiff against the backboard. One of his arms didn’t look too good, all slung up, and he was covered with this clean white blanket, and there was always the chance they needed to be grateful for what they couldn’t see. How bad it was.

So _how bad was it?_

‘…The ‘major’ thing,’ Alenko continued. ‘It’s not…’ He had the grit too; James could hear it. And he had to go and focus on James first—not Cortez standing next to him—so James did something stupid.

Something _real_ stupid.

He straightened his shoulders, standing to attention with an honest-to-god salute.

It was the only thing he could do, the only thing he knew how to. Maybe some of them had the wrong dog-tags but they still had _something_ , the metal tinkling in the silence, the cot shifting, somebody clearing their throat, James waiting—because of the look on Alenko’s face—for a _screw you_.

But Alenko looked away, down at his hand in his lap, his other one strapped to his side and swollen beneath a whole mess of medical tape.

‘So,’ Alenko said, his voice on the edge of the grit. It had to be him, ‘cause nobody else talked like that. ‘You two…made it.’

‘So did you,’ Cortez said.

‘That’s ‘cause he’s tougher than he looks.’ James’s elbow hurt when he unbent it. He had to lighten up those reps—or do more until the pain knew who it was dealing with and quit coming around. ‘Isn’t that right? One serious little motherfucker. Glad to see you’re still kicking. _Damn_ —Major Kaidan Alenko.’

‘The ‘major’ thing,’ Alenko repeated. ‘If you could… Don’t.’

‘You know Vega.’ Cortez found something close to a chair and pulled it to the side of the cot. He sat down easy, like unfolding his legs didn’t hurt, while James stared at the back of his neck waiting to see the hair stand on end or the skin roll with a shiver. Or something. Or _anything_. But Cortez had experience with this shit, always talking to _his guys_ or however he thought of them. Probably _his guys_. James knew the look. ‘Would you believe he _still_ isn’t so good with taking directions?’

‘I take _orders_ ,’ James said. ‘It’s different. _Way_ different. Not even in the same galaxy.’

Alenko coughed. It took James a minute to realize it was actually a chuckle, this dry thing scrubbed clean by all the grit. ‘Yeah. I remember that.’

‘He’s hard to forget,’ Cortez said. ‘Sometimes I think he does it on purpose.’

‘So long as he’s not beating everybody at cards.’ Alenko’s bad hand twitched, movement James’d needed in Cortez but got in another place. Of course. Everything always came that way; the stuff you wanted was always the stuff that hurt. They called that irony, saying _isn’t that ironic_? And James called it bullshit. ‘I remember that too. So…’ Alenko swallowed. ‘How long’s it been?’

James didn’t feel like grinning. That was Major Alenko, all right, getting down to business, with a cool head on his shoulders. But maybe having the head on his shoulders wasn’t enough, no matter how steady it sat.

He wasn’t staring at his own hands anymore but at the far wall, where an Asari and a Salarian were comparing notes, talking in quiet voices about statistics—how many of their patients were gonna die by the time night fell and power got rationed out, just enough light to guide them all to their beds. And that didn’t count the looters, the profiteers, the mercs, real people with real needs but no conscience, risking everything for a little something extra.

Now the grit was in James’s jaw. He clenched it tight, muscles flexing over the bone.

‘That long?’ Alenko asked.

‘Not that long,’ Cortez replied. ‘Since…the mass relays,’ he added, all careful like a doctor himself, still able to get what _navigating_ meant even when conditions were balled up and he was out of the zone, ‘it’s been a little over a month. You want the exact number? I can give you that.’

‘No.’ Alenko released a breath. James didn’t. He could feel it swelling up in his chest like a pressurized airlock. ‘…No thanks, I mean. That’s fine.’

‘You being a model patient?’ James asked. ‘That Asari and me—we’re pretty tight. And some of the guys in here get _rowdy_ , Alenko.’

Alenko’d dealt with a whole lot in his time, more than James’d been there for. Not more than James’d seen, but a whole lot. These things didn’t take guys like them by surprise anymore. They were trained for surprises, for rough riding and poison atmosphere, any kind of enemy they _might_ come up against because _might_ meant _would_ , especially in the final hours. Whatever they were calling it. Some catchy name James didn’t think about because the package was too neat. But whatever it was about James’s attitude that made Alenko cough-and-laugh again was _almost_ a surprise, and that was all right.

Alenko was all right.

He was alive, for one thing. Breathing enough _to_ cough or laugh. He still knew what the sound was and he could make it on his own.

He _had_ to make it on his own.

It wasn’t like he had another choice.

James ground his molars together. He thought of the whole thing like a round of poker, one he wanted to win, to prove he could make a comeback or just plain beat somebody, show them who was who. A matter of pride not turning into wounded ego. It was his poker face; for some reason, he’d never thought about using it anywhere other than poker before.

So long as none of the usual stuff showed up in his eyes— _You knew the Commander?_ and everything that came after, all the _My Condolences_ and _Sorry for your loss_ bullshit—then nobody’d have to think about it.

Not more than they already were.

It stayed inside, hanging with the grit, between James’s throat and his chest. It didn’t sink any lower, didn’t rise to the top. And Alenko didn’t see it—didn’t cut off laughing suddenly, twisting his fingers in the bandage around his wrist, all the color draining from his face. As good as Alenko’s poker face was, James already knew it wasn’t the best.

‘OK,’ Alenko said. ‘Yeah, Vega, I’m… Yeah. Being a model patient. Haven’t given anyone any crap yet, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘That’s _all_ I’m asking,’ James said. ‘I’d better not hear anything, either. You got that?’

Alenko’s mouth did this funny thing like it didn’t know what it _was_ doing, like he didn’t know what to tell it to do. It got stuck somewhere between a smile and not a smile, some kind of nothing, like an old M29 Grizzly stalling out on rocky terrain. You couldn’t be gentle with the old M29 Grizzly. You had to be rough to kick it back into the right gear again, and people were always complaining they had bruises after the ride was finished.

Alenko didn’t look like he could afford to be bruised up any more than he already was, or like he’d be jamming any clutches anytime soon. He didn’t look like he knew how to keep a grip on anything more than himself, and even that was shaky.

But he _was_ managing it. For now.  

‘So, you know when you’ll be out yet?’ Cortez asked. His voice had this calm to it, this steadiness; he sounded like he was chatting about the weather, just saying hey and what’s up. Wrong question, right question—at least somebody was talking and silence wasn’t winning.

‘Not yet. Soon, maybe. I don’t know.’ Alenko’s expression had quit it with the almost and the sort of. It was holding steady, holding its own. He was looking at Cortez, focusing on his face, and that helped, too. ‘You know, I’m starting to feel like I spend way too much time just waiting around in hospitals.’

‘Piccadilly Memorial Field is one of the best there is,’ Cortez said. ‘And I’m not just saying that because of Vega’s Asari friend over there. I mean it. You look good, Alenko. After everything… You look real good.’

‘You’re just saying that,’ Kaidan said. ‘But… I’ll take it. Thanks. You look pretty good, yourself.’

Cortez’s voice got warm without any warning. ‘Yeah, well—Vega doesn’t dent.’

‘I seem to remember that, too,’ Kaidan said.

‘Well, however long it takes,’ James said, ‘you can bet _this_ guy’s gonna be bugging you the whole time. Esteban can’t get enough of the place. Might be he hit his head during the crash and now he thinks he’s some kind of _doctor_.’

‘Me?’ Cortez looked up finally, meeting James eye to eye. James held his gaze until he couldn’t anymore, because one poker face could only stretch so far before it snapped. When he swallowed, he could feel the grit on its way down, scraping up his lungs, tearing up his gut. Enough reps, though, and he’d get used to it. Build up muscle on the inside, not just everywhere else. But Cortez held it, long after James looked away, long after James’s dog-tags jingled with the movement. ‘Never dreamt of it. I’m just a pilot.’

*


	5. CORTEZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve thinks about Vega and visits Kaidan.

Vega did good that day, even if it might’ve been by accident.

Problem was, he didn’t do so well when it came to positive reinforcement.

Most guys like James Vega didn’t actually need the gold stars, the pats on the back, the recommendations of their friends and the commendations of their superiors. Sometimes the feedback was exactly what they _didn’t_ want, and Steve got the feeling—walking back in the darkness, every other lamp dimly lit except for the ones that were snapped in two or just plain missing—that this was one of those times. Pointing it out was bound to make Vega feel like he was caught in civvies two sizes too small for him.

Or worse—it’d make him feel like he didn’t deserve the praise.

The last time Steve offered Vega a credit for his thoughts, he’d bought himself nothing more articulate than a grunt and a shrug: Vega’s big shoulders rolling, his eyes unfocusing on a distant zone. He was seeing something Steve couldn’t guess at and knew he shouldn’t bother trying, something deep and personal and buried under too much muscle, buried for a reason.

Steve glanced over, the space between them minimal but deceptively easy to close. Vega’s expression was just as dusky as the dark. And Steve was starting to realize Vega was right about one thing—the _cerveza_ —because while some guys only waxed poetic when they were too drunk, Steve did the opposite, when he was too sober.

Those little distances, man. They’d get you every time.

‘Huh,’ Vega said. He had good instincts; Steve’d always suspected that.

‘Couldn’t’ve said it better myself, Mr. Vega,’ Steve replied.

‘Sure couldn’t’ve. That’s why you didn’t even try.’ Vega stopped in the shelter of a wall and Steve stopped with him; when he asked himself how things would’ve gone if they hadn’t had each other, a decent support group, familiar faces, something to connect _before_ with _after_ so _now_ could make some goddamn sense, he didn’t have any answers.

He had fewer of those than he pretended, looking into strangers’ eyes and saying, _Hey, I get it._

But compassion didn’t mean understanding. And Vega, wherever he was inside his head, wasn’t trying to put two and two together. He was just standing in the shadows, stretching his arms out in front of his chest, fingers locked through fingers, snapping his head from one side to the other and cracking loose all the tension he’d been carrying in the base of his neck.

It’d been one hell of a day.

‘It’s been one hell of a day,’ Steve added.

‘Sure has,’ Vega said.

‘I knew this guy once who might’ve called the whole thing _loco_.’ Steve maintained the little distance; space was something he got, knowing when something was too close to call or just close enough. This seemed right. Maybe if they’d had a deck of cards, some thermoses between them, a late night snack of proteins and somewhere to sit, things could’ve worked out differently.

But this was the hand they’d been given.

‘Figure I’ll visit him until they let him out for good behavior, just like you said.’ Steve rubbed the back of his neck. It got sore whenever he thought about the knots in Vega’s muscles—and his hands needed to rub _something_ out whenever he thought about them, too. ‘You could always drop by, visit your Asari…friend.’

‘Don’t even know her name,’ Vega said.

‘She have a nickname, then?’ Steve asked.

‘Nope.’ Vega followed that up with another vertebral pop, the last one. Some of the fugees taking up impermanent residence in the shelter passed by; they were even laughing over somebody’s joke. It was a familiar sound, but quieter than Vega’s joints. ‘Gonna go work out.’

‘You do your dinosaur thing,’ Steve told him. ‘Have fun. Don’t come back too late. Hey, Vega—just remember curfew.’

Vega lifted his hand in the old wave—not a salute but an over-the-shoulder thing, already on his way between beams of muted lamplight.

Steve thought about him that night.

He thought about him the next morning, too, through breakfast, catching sight of him at work—helping Turians again, doing his rebuilding thing instead of his dinosaur thing, all the heavy lifting he didn’t, apparently, count as real exercise—and some more at lunch, when they shared a couple of proteins together without saying much. After that Steve just had to follow the laughter, kids racing through the halls, dodging them as they pinged off the walls and underfoot, and Vega lumbering by behind them with a _Yo, Esteban_ , but not looking up.

Steve didn’t want to suffocate anybody. But Kaidan Alenko was alone in that temp ICU and by now, he’d know all the stories, hear all the theories, all the times people said _Commander Shepard_ like they were praying, not like they were remembering. It was an honor. It was incredible for Steve to think that he’d served with that guy, that he’d even called him a friend. And Shepard…

Commander Shepard had helped Steve through his fair share of stuff he didn’t know how to process, shit he hadn’t known how to fly through at the time.

So there was that. Steve showed up at Piccadilly in the early afternoon when Alenko was eating lunch, dutiful, the kind of soldier Vega wasn’t.

He didn’t look hungry.

Considering how the food tasted, Steve didn’t blame him.

‘Hey,’ he said. All the thoughts, all the extra cargo, got docked before he sat, body folding as easily as the first time. They were lucky if it was that simple, even luckier if they could recognize when it was, and Steve had _some_ experience with cultivating these skills in particular.

Alenko fought his way through some protein one-handed. Steve didn’t offer to help because offering help to a soldier when he hadn’t called for reinforcements was like offering praise to a marine when all he wanted was something to drink. Right place, right time. Wrong place, big problem. Figuring that out was even harder than being a good judge of simplicity, which _some people_ had trouble with.

Then again, those people didn’t seem to have any difficulty being dinosaurs. Not everyone could do that, now could they?

It took all kinds.  

‘Hey,’ Alenko said.

‘Looks like Vega was right,’ Steve said. ‘Here I am already. He sure called it. Better not tell _him_ that, though. His head’s big enough as-is—although maybe it’s the other stuff that’s too big, come to think of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Alenko agreed. ‘…Yeah.’

‘…And I figured maybe the food they’re having you eat might go down better if you had someone to suffer with,’ Steve added. He took a thermos out of the pack he’d brought, nothing special, lunch he was putting off until the right company made it bearable. He didn’t mind sharing the thermos of carbonated water that almost, _almost_ tasted like something, but only if you closed your eyes and held your breath. ‘It’s not much, but it washes the other stuff down. Even helps you digest it after. You don’t _want_ to know how many war credits it took me to get some of this in the first place—and I guess I should’ve saved it up for something a little stronger, huh?’

Steve unscrewed the top and poured some out into it, liquid fizzling. He handed it off to Alenko for the first drink; Alenko took it, still one-handed and still unsteady, while Steve pretended he didn’t see the way it shook, the way some of it spilled clear and wet onto Alenko’s thigh.

It wouldn’t stain because it wasn’t much more than fancy, decontaminated water. Once it dried, nobody else would know it’d happened.

Alenko stared down at the splatter. To his credit, he brought the cup to his lips pretty quickly after that, and drank most of it in one gulp.

Maybe he wasn’t hungry, but he was definitely thirsty.

‘Hits the spot, doesn’t it?’ Steve asked. Alenko nodded. ‘I mean, I know it’s not the _cerveza_ Vega’s always after me to use my connections for—because the way I see it is, if he wants it badly enough, he’ll figure out a way to get his hands on it himself—but it actually feels like drinking _something_.’

‘Got a rations program in place?’ Alenko asked.

‘Something like that,’ Steve replied. ‘Most days it even works the way it’s supposed to.’

‘Everything’s really efficient.’ Alenko finished off the drink. The empty cup looked easier to hold, carefully circled down to cover up the damp spots on the blanket. ‘It’s pretty impressive for… How long did you say it’s been? A little over a month? It’s _definitely_ impressive.’

‘We’ve done all right. Considering everything that’s still not accounted for, maybe we could do even better.’ Steve wondered if he was starting to sound like Vega—they’d practically been living together, or right on top of each other. It was almost the same thing, only one implied conscious effort and the other suggested a lack of other, viable options. Either way, they saw each other regularly, every day, morning and night, a part of the bigger London crew that’d formed: doctors to look after the wounded, soldiers to keep the peace and rebuild the worst of the damage, even a few scientists to figure out what they could use, how they were going to use it. __

 _And,_ Vega liked to say, _no fuckin’ council, either. No jumping through any more of_ their _hoops._

Whatever came up to replace the old system was going to slap them all with so many regulations they’d be reeling for days, more like weeks, afterward. They wouldn’t be able to trade extra work for extra light or cash in on a few later curfews here and there—not once things did get organized back into bureaucracy. And the second that happened, maybe the second _before_ it happened, when all the rules got sorted out and they made a hierarchy from the rubble, Vega was going to grab his stuff and head out of town, saying something like, ‘Screw _this_ , Esteban. I’m not playing this game _no more_. Now it’s New York or bust.’

 _Bust_ , Steve thought. He drank straight from the thermos, cool water sparkling all the way down, despite the faintly chemical aftertaste it carried with it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand after, thumb under his lower lip.

‘Don’t undersell it,’ Alenko said, softening. ‘Really. It’s incredible, how people—how everyone just…heals. Hell, _I’ve_ done it enough times; I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised anymore.’

‘I’ve been there,’ Steve said.

‘And I’m there right now,’ Alenko replied. ‘Again. Crazy, isn’t it? Just…crazy.’

His fingers tightened around the cup. Steve knew that look; he also knew that this wasn’t what they were really talking about: that Alenko knew the story—the _stories_ , which Steve tried to listen to and which Vega pretended _not_ to listen to.

One of them had to pick up all the pieces, keep an open mind instead of just a clear head. Steve realized pretty fast that someone was him.

At least it didn’t hurt the way he’d thought it would. He mourned the passing of a friend, not the death of an ideal. And there wasn’t a body, nothing anyone could point to, just a bunch of memorials set up all over the city to the same guy. Special ones, without any flowers.

Nobody had any flowers. It wasn’t the right season.

But there was no way—there was just no way. Nobody could’ve survived that blast on Citadel when the Mass Relays blew and everything stopped, and then everything started again, changing again. Life as they knew it stripped of synthetic life as they knew it; everything was so crazy Steve remembered thinking, _You know what, we’re probably all dead, and this is what it looks like. A hallucination before the end, not even a dream, just a couple of random neural firings, the what-if scenarios we never drilled_.

There was no way Alenko didn’t know about Shepard.

He was alive and okay without Shepard, alive but not okay. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be, but it _would_ take time, longer than his bruises, even if those things were looking mean.  

They were already starting to fade. And Alenko already knew not to pick at them, to draw attention to them, to let them be.

‘You know, if I ever find the butcher in charge of making these proteins,’ Steve said, ‘I’m going to tell him he might as well sell us all Turian food and stop acting like he gives a damn. Anything’s better than this.’

‘Anything’s better than this,’ Alenko agreed. He sighed, sounding like an airlock being decompressed.

And that was how—somewhere between arriving and leaving, less than a full hour—Steve offered to take him back to his place at the shelter when he had clearance to get out of there. Just as a stopover, something to look forward to, but the offer was there on the table.

‘That is, _if_ you don’t mind Vega snoring all the time,’ Steve added. ‘Which you will, but if _I_ could get used to it, you’ll have no problem.’

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan said in that way of his, slow leaching into even slower. ‘Yeah… If you’re sure you two wouldn’t mind having me. You know, if…’

‘You wouldn’t be interrupting anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Steve almost laughed. ‘Wow, no, we’re just—sticking together. Like old times. For old times.’

‘Seems like those are the only ones we’ve got,’ Kaidan said, and rubbed the spot on his thigh where the spilled drink was already dried up.

*


	6. ALENKO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan waits for someone to show up. They don't.

Two more days.

Kaidan Alenko had two more days in Piccadilly Memorial Field Hospital as a downgraded inpatient.

‘You’ve done well, Major,’ his new Salarian doctor said. ‘You’ve done _incredibly_ well.’

Kaidan closed his eyes.

The bruised flesh surrounding them had faded in the past few weeks, visible progress Steve brought a mirror to help him track. The first time Kaidan saw his own reflection, swollen lips cracked and dark, eyes unexpectedly bright in the middle of so much jacked up flesh, he didn’t drop the mirror. The glass didn’t break. There were no seven years of bad luck because all Kaidan did was hold onto the thing tighter and say, ‘I _knew_ you were just trying to be polite about how I looked, Cortez.’

‘Steve,’ he said. ‘You know, Vega’s got this nickname system—maybe he’s smarter than he looks, at least about that. Figuring out what to call people without having to worry if you’re being too friendly or not friendly enough… Sounds to me like he’s onto something.’

‘You’re not being too friendly,’ Kaidan said. ‘…Steve.’ His mouth moved with the words. He watched them come out in a backward shape and listened to them as they sounded all right. ‘All the nicknames I’ve had… Well, they weren’t always ones I _wanted_ to have, ones I was proud to call mine.’

‘Biotic stuff?’ Steve asked.

‘No,’ Kaidan replied. ‘ _Vancouver_ stuff. Didn’t you hear? We’re too nice to be soldiers that side of the old border.’

He managed a chuckle. Steve put the mirror away. Then it was time for a checkup so Steve left, and Kaidan looked forward to that with a headache that started right behind his eyes. Anxiety caused them. Stress headaches. When situations were tough or when he was anticipating something unpleasant they always started up again. The inside of him was more predictable than anything going on outside.

Too bad it _had_ to be so unpleasant.

Kaidan was just waiting for the day they came for him. Old soldiers who’d worked their way up in the ranks always talked with the same kind of voice, and even when it pitched itself loud to be heard over chaos or quiet to be shared as classified intelligence, it was still _the same kind of voice_. He’d asked himself once, would he sound like that someday when he was older?

Would Shepard…

But they were going to want to know what Kaidan knew. They were going to have to debrief him. They had to know about him already and they were coming to catch up, to keep tabs, to touch base; they’d be there with matching shoulders and mended uniforms, probably after a routine checkup, when Kaidan was finally cleared. When they knew he wouldn’t stall out like the Mako or just plain fold like a house of cards.

 _Major Alenko_.

 _You’re going to have to forgive me if I don’t salute_ , Kaidan practiced by thinking, lips moving, as Salarian fingers rolled up the back of his gown and checked in with his broken ribs, the lacerations and the swellings and the edema. _My saluting arm’s still feeling a little stiff, but other than that, I hear I’m doing pretty good._

Two more days. He wasn’t even in intensive anymore. If they were coming for answers, they were taking their time.

Or they weren’t coming at all.

Or they already knew there was nothing to come for.

…Or somebody was keeping them off Kaidan’s back.

‘Heart rate elevated,’ the Salarian said. ‘Major Alenko, are you experiencing any acute physical discomfort at the present time?’

‘No,’ Kaidan said. ‘I’m good. I’m doing pretty good.’

He didn’t need a mirror to know how ridiculous that looked coming out of his face the way _it_ looked, even now, what took its sweet time to heal. When he rested his head against the pillow it didn’t ever _really_ stop hurting, a thrum between his ears and under his cheekbones, and if he ever drifted off without realizing, shifting always woke him up again, the bruises aching down to the bones beneath. It wasn’t in his blood anymore. It was somewhere a whole lot deeper.

But that was pain you couldn’t quantify, nothing a Salarian volunteer could mark down on his charts with a tut and a _hm_ that sounded melodic, even it was only almost.

‘Cough now,’ the Salarian said.

Kaidan obliged.

His ribs didn’t hurt as much anymore; neither did his lungs. He could take breaths that actually meant something without feeling like bone was piercing muscle and other vital tissues; the Salarian seemed to think it was an improvement, anyway. Doctors and nurses got the same look when they were marking down something like _progress, good_ and also when they weren’t.

Kaidan didn’t roll the gown back down. The Salarian did that for him. He thought about exercises, PT, atrophy, the walks he took around the Field Hospital with Steve, and everybody who wasn’t coming to visit him.

‘Major Alenko.’ The Asari nurse—James Vega’s Asari nurse, apparently—took the clipboard from her Salarian friend. ‘There’s somebody here to visit you.’

Kaidan blinked. He thought he could hear a humming in his ears, but in the end, it was just ambient noise, an old memory, everything narrowing to focus on the present, and an echo he hadn’t expected. It sounded familiar, like déjà-vu.

Or like déjà-vu all over again.

He’d been here before. He’d done it already. He’d grieved and moved on and moved up and then, everything…

It still mattered, but he couldn’t let it matter _right now_.

‘Sure,’ Kaidan said. ‘I mean, thanks. Send them in.’

 _Major Alenko_. He braced himself. He could guess what the Salarian would have to say about his heartrate now, but it wasn’t physical pain that brought on the sudden shift.

‘Her, actually.’ Kaidan squinted but he didn’t have to; it was Diana Allers, that reporter from the Normandy, and she was looking good. Even back then, in the final hours, she _still_ looked good—composed, like somebody broadcasting should, sending a message to everyone who was still watching. _I’ve got the time to comb my hair, so we’re gonna be okay_. ‘I _heard_ you were here. Had to see it for myself, though. That’s just how reporters are, you know?’

‘If you say so.’ Kaidan watched her track her way to the stand next to his cot, working her angle. She had to be after something specific. ‘It’s not my thing—not personally, anyway.’

‘You soldiers. You’re pretty much all alike,’ Allers said, then sighed. ‘You always think I’m not talking business when I am, or that I _am_ talking business when I’m not. And don’t get me started on the flirting. Look—you don’t have to worry, all right? I’m not here for the big scoop. There aren’t any broadcasts going out right _now,_ anyway. I’ve got a show, and we do this daily printing… Just to keep everybody informed. Lots of leg-work, mostly. I’m surprised I still have feet and I swear, I’ve never been in such great shape in my _life_. Don’t look so eager to agree with me about that, by the way.’

‘I can tell,’ Kaidan said, delayed but still mostly on cue. ‘It’s really working for you.’

‘Thanks.’ Allers glanced up and grinned, tight but real. ‘You can tell I’m not here for an interview or the inside scoop because _I’m_ the one doing all the talking. Breaking the first rule of reporting and everything.’

‘Right,’ Kaidan said.

‘Honestly, I’m trying to be a good person. I…just thought maybe you wouldn’t mind asking a so-called ‘objective’ source any questions you had.’ Allers had sharp eyes; Kaidan hadn’t noticed them before because honestly, he hadn’t been looking. He squinted again, not at anything in front of him now, mostly at what _wasn’t_ there anymore. He wasn’t surprised when nothing seemed real, then blinked dizzy white stars out of his eyes. ‘So… Any questions?’

‘Nothing I can think of at the moment,’ Kaidan said.

Allers shook her head and shrugged. ‘Somehow, I figured you’d say that. Well, it’s free of charge no matter what, OK? And the offer still stands. I was just passing through. Besides…’ Allers licked her lower lip, sucked it in, folded her arms, easy action on top of sore muscles. Kaidan knew. He lived it; he could tell. ‘…I don’t know. I guess I have to see things for myself or else I figure somebody’s trying to sell me something that isn’t real. You take care of yourself, all right?’

‘Not exactly something I’ve been good at in the past,’ Kaidan said. ‘…But I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Since I asked so nicely,’ Allers replied. ‘Honestly, if you _don’t,_ I can think of way too many people who wouldn’t be able to handle it. The big, tough guys especially.’

She meant Vega. ‘I know a couple of those,’ Kaidan said.

‘They need all the help they can get.’ Allers dropped a pamphlet on Kaidan’s bed. ‘Check it out. It’s got some good stuff in it—and I’m not just saying that because I wrote most of it myself.’

‘Thanks,’ Kaidan said.

‘For _what_?’ Allers asked.

She didn’t ask for anything else; she was already long gone, only passing through. Kaidan stared down at the articles in front of him, narrow print columns about natural resources running low and local refugee experiences and some breaking news about riots and looting in New York, the hopeful folded into the despairing. There wasn’t anything about Canada; Kaidan didn’t know why he’d thought about it in the first place. Vancouver. Home, kind of. A big picture window and a deck and a breeze and a young kid who had no idea what he was in for.

It passed through too—like that breeze or like Allers or like all the information he still wasn’t processing. And he never learned the end of pretty much all the items in the bulletin. His eyes kept stopping whenever they mentioned two words, a rank and a name, a whole lot more important than _Major Alenko_. Whenever Kaidan got to that while he was reading, he skipped to the next article, until finally he’d run out of words to skim and words to ignore and there was nothing left but a piece of paper in his lap.

Two days later, he was released. Steve was there and Vega too, only the second time he’d shown up. 

Kaidan took his first few steps out of Piccadilly, leaving old news behind.

*


	7. VEGA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cortez and Vega bunk together and Vega works out.

‘It’s only for a little while,’ Cortez said. ‘Don’t look at _me_ , Mr. Vega. It’s not like you jumped at the chance to move out when Allers offered. She had that nice place and everything.’

‘Just don’t ask me to share a toothbrush,’ James replied, ‘and we’re cool.’

He kept most of his stuff in a duffel, just in case. Easy to pick up and pack out and move on, and if anything happened, it was all there. He knew what to grab, what he needed and what he didn’t, and it even fit with the rest of the room. Not much to look at, just a bed and a pillow and the table, and the old ship model, the aquarium VI.

Cortez dropped his bag of stuff next to that table, not heavy enough to move it when the duffel hit one of the legs on its way down. He looked at the model ship and the VI that stuck out like a sore thumb, a _broken_ thumb, but didn’t say anything about it, James daring him to with his eyes.

They’d set up next to each other early on with Allers on the other side of James’s space, because it was the only thing that made sense in a world that didn’t anymore. But a few weeks in, Allers moved out, into another compound with another…roommate.

‘You know she’s living with Traynor now, right?’ James asked. ‘They’re running that whole _News from London_ thing together.’

‘Right, right. I remember that.’ There was no chair for Cortez to pull up and have a seat on, so he leaned against the wall instead, next to where he’d rolled his cot, with James pushing it from behind to get it around the corner, past the lifted tarp. The table separated them now. More like road-block than road-cocoa, James thought. ‘Pretty impressive, too, how she managed to set the whole thing up so fast.’

‘Pretty impressive how we can do alla this without somebody calling all the shots, you mean?’ James dropped to the spot beside his bed, floor cold beneath his palm, tucking his other arm behind his back. He curled his knuckles, blunt nails tucked in, found the right angle, and lowered himself all the way, where the floor was cool but clean. At least compared to everything else. There was nothing but shadow under his bed, not even dust down there. His elbow bent. He held the position, feeling all the muscles of his body, from his shoulders to his calves, pectorals and triceps and deltoids. He knew all the names, that one-handed push-ups always worked best, but it was more important how they felt after: so damn tired and so damn real. ‘No surprise here. Council didn’t know—the hell it was doing. Just there to—make things complicated. Better off—doing things ourselves.’

In between counts, he remembered to breathe.

Cortez once said it was almost like a miracle James could talk and exercise at the same time.

But exercising was the only time James _could_ talk. The repetition made it possible, up and down, regulating his breathing and tightening his brain.

And Cortez was still in the corner next to the tarp, arms folded, not moving, watching the action.

James didn’t start to sweat for a while, but when he did, he could feel it in the usual places, under his arms and down the center of his chest, on his upper lip, mostly on his forehead and in the small of his back, maybe some on his stomach, too.

‘It’s only for a little while,’ Cortez said again, into James’s grunts. He figured it was fine to start grunting after a hundred reps. And it was fine to stop thinking after two-hundred. ‘Besides, you’re the one who suggested it. Don’t worry—I’ve got my own toothbrush.’

James didn’t hear Cortez walking closer, but he did see his legs swing around in front as he crossed to James’s bed. James knew he was sitting, could feel Cortez’s shins almost grazing his obliques. He thought about how much harder it’d be with Cortez planting his foot between James’s shoulder-blades and pushing down. He thought about the challenge and he thought about how sore he’d be after, how quick he’d fall asleep, and how he’d wake up early, stiff, in more ways than one.

‘My idea, but you didn’t argue with it, did you?’ James bumped Cortez’s knee with the arm he’d twisted behind his back. ‘Now we have to hope the guy doesn’t have nightmares.’

‘That won’t even be a problem if he’s a light sleeper, anyway,’ Cortez said. ‘Considering how much you snore, Mr. Vega, it’s not all that surprising that Diana moved out, either.’

James grunted, _huh_. The clap that followed was him switching hands, once, fancy, and he thought he could hear Cortez snort, grudging recognition of the effort it took to do that kind of thing mid-air. Then, James sank all the way down to the floor again but for some reason he stayed there, waiting, head turned away from the bed, staring at the bottom of the broken wall where Steve’s duffel rested next to the clawed foot of the table. There was a snag in the fabric where it’d caught against something sharp, almost tearing but not quite.

‘How’s he holding up, anyway?’ James asked. ‘Major Alenko.’

‘I figure it’s something like you right now, actually,’ Cortez replied. ‘Going through the repetitions. Stuff he knows, stuff his body knows. He’s doing pretty well, all things considered.’

‘Huh,’ James said again, and started his count all over from the beginning. One turned into ten pretty quick, then to twenty, and after that keeping count was just a way to prove to his brain what his body already knew about the situation.

‘Anyway,’ Cortez added, quieter, ‘just because I’ve got my own experiences doesn’t mean there’s anything I can say to him to make _his_ easier. It’s all about how he processes this. For all we know, he’ll never _really_ …’

‘Must _suck_ to have people talking about you behind your back like this all the time, though.’ James was closing in on fifty. After that, the next landmark was a hundred. ‘You know how _I_ process _that_ , Esteban?’

‘By being a dinosaur?’ Cortez asked.

James closed out the feeling of amusement, the chuckle that came with. _No kidding_ , he thought, while his civvies brushed against Cortez’s, tee on fatigues. It was just fabric brushing fabric. It didn’t mean anything. Sometimes Cortez let himself in before they were sharing a room, just to watch. Now, he didn’t have that far to go, both of them letting an old friend stay close by. If he lost his shit—if he went completely _loco_ in the night, like he had every right to do—then they’d be there to hold him down until he came back to earth again.

 _Earth_. Where they all were. Broadcasting news as far as New York and Vancouver and wherever else, but not up through the atmosphere.

The sweat was running down James’s spine and under his belt. His blood was hot and the floor under his hand was hot, but every time his chest made it within a centimeter of the marble, the stone was still cold. It didn’t breathe toward him. He was the one doing the moving. Even if the earth was spinning and going around the sun at the same time, James was the one going up and down.

 _One hundred_.

Time was just flying.

‘You don’t have to show off anymore, you know,’ Cortez said. ‘Color me already impressed.’

‘This isn’t for you,’ James said.

‘Yeah.’ Cortez didn’t budge. Maybe the added pressure was in the air already, something James was pushing against, and Cortez thought a little more would be what made _him_ go loco. It wasn’t going to happen. James hadn’t seen worse, but he’d trained for this. He was ready for it. His body especially, but that wasn’t the only thing. ‘I know it’s not. …But I don’t mind pretending it is every once in a while.’

‘Should’ve called _you_ Loco,’ James said, doing the last of his reps in quiet.

It was the least he could do on this stinking budget. He’d already broken one of the lampposts out back, old metal shearing clean in two, an easy break.

‘I don’t know,’ Cortez said. ‘You can’t change now. I’m too used to Esteban. Wish you could make me more of your famous _heuvos,_ though.’

James grabbed for something to towel off with and Cortez handed it to him, fingers on fingers. James’s hand was too numb, all the blood rushing back to his fingertips, to feel it. He had to pulse his grip on the terrycloth a couple of times to shake it off and loosen up the joints, then wiped the back of his neck, his forehead, messing up his hair, rolling up his t-shirt to get his stomach and lower back. He snapped the tented fabric twice for some air on his skin, and he couldn’t reach his shoulders, so he didn’t bother trying. When he was finished, the towel was damp and his blood wasn’t cool yet. He knelt by the bed, bone meeting marble and neither one winning.

‘You could quit staring and pass me something to drink,’ he said.

‘Figures I’d be bunking with the one guy in London who shows off, then complains when people take notice,’ Cortez replied.

He grabbed the thermos off the floor anyway, passing it to James. That was cool, too, metal sides scratched up, providing texture he needed to get a solid grip. James wrapped his fingers around it and unscrewed the top and drank, for a long time, until all the air in his lungs ran out and there was nothing left in the thermos save for a few drops. Those always drove James crazy, knowing they were there, not being able to get ‘em out.

‘You know you love it,’ James said, wiping the grin and the water away with the back of his wrist.

Steve leaned forward, elbows braced on his thighs, until they were close. Not too close but _real_ close, noses almost touching, the way James got all the way down to the floor when he let his arm bend at the perfect angle and his lips nearly brushed the marble. He could see Cortez’s eyes, which were baby blues on the worst days, bright even from a distance. Up close, they had no flecks of gray in them, not like the marble at all.

The marble didn’t breathe toward him, but Steve Cortez did.

‘…You missed a spot,’ he said finally, taking a corner of the sweaty towel and rubbing it along the side of James’s throat—where the pulse got worked up and James could feel it, thudding, into the ink he had on the skin.

‘Yeah.’ James swallowed. ‘Always forget that’s there.’

‘You just need some outsider perspective, that’s all,’ Cortez said. ‘Easier to see those things.’

‘When you’re watching,’ James said.

For all the times Cortez hadn’t backed down, he chose this one to pull away, stretching his arms out, heels of his palms rubbing his thighs to his knees, sleeves rolled up to the elbow. ‘Some people make it hard not to. Like I said—only guy in London who shows off, then calls people out for watching. You’re a complicated man, Mr. Vega.’

‘You sure about that, Esteban?’ James asked. ‘Most people think it’s the opposite.’

That night, they didn’t talk, bunk to bunk. They slept on opposite sides of the room, but James felt like he could _also_ feel Cortez breathing, up and down, in and out. It was something he _could_ feel, instead of everything that went by unnoticed—all the stuff they relied on and all the stuff that mattered most, bars that didn’t snap when you were just trying to pull your own weight. 

*


	8. CORTEZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vega makes Steve some huevos.

Nothing happened.

And that was a good thing, Steve told himself. They needed their downtime, their rest and relaxation. At least, up to a point they did.

He’d seen some of the guys get stir crazy plenty of times; he’d seen their faces when they realized what was going on outside of Piccadilly, too. When they realized how much they’d lost but also when they realized how quickly people were bringing it back together again. They wanted their scars to stay and mean something, only it couldn’t be raw flesh and open wounds all the time. Nobody could live like that.

And Steve _had_ tried.

To say that healing was part of the process of being healed almost seemed too obvious—except that it was the one thing most people couldn’t wrap their heads around. They couldn’t forget what they’d been through or what they’d lost. They had to keep pointing to it, pointing it out.

They didn’t want pretty. Raw was what they knew.

Kaidan was doing okay, that place between fine and good, a stopover along the way. Steve was the one who kept saying he needed some fresh air—because providing excuses was what you did if you wanted to help out. Whether or not the lie was as obvious as it felt didn’t matter so long as nobody called him on it.

And Kaidan didn’t, wouldn’t do it. Whether or not he was grateful…

That was something else.

Vega didn’t allow it, but Kaidan took the walks without protest, levering himself out of bed in the early afternoon. He moved slow but steady, one foot in front of the other, just like he was supposed to. They widened their radius each time, walking in broad sweeps around the neighborhood. The sunlight felt good even if the air didn’t feel clean.

One time they passed Vega helping out—where else?—at the orphanage, surrounded by kids, doing his dinosaur thing.

‘He does that a lot,’ Steve said. Like he had to explain it; like it was his place or his right or even his pleasure.

But something about watching the kids play together made Kaidan’s face get tight, especially around the cheekbones, not so much around the mouth. His skin didn’t look like it fit anymore, more bruise than flesh, so they didn’t stay long.

Knowing what it was that was up and not being able to fix it—Steve spent more time with his hands balled into fists than he liked, or jiggling his knee when he was sitting. _Preoccupied_ was part of it, seeing what needed to be done and thinking about it instead of making it happen, because it wasn’t that simple.

Some things got busted. Some weren’t meant to fly again.

Most of the more easily repurposed scrap metal had gone into ground transport, which just wasn’t the same. Steve felt comfortable behind the wheel no matter what, but he’d seen so many generations of IFVs at this point that he was starting to agree with _Vega_ , of all people, about the merits of the M29 Grizzly.

It was what it was.

‘Gotcha something,’ Vega said, stepping in, while Steve was doing something else.

Not just anything. He was messing with the aquarium VI. It didn’t have to be fixed; there wasn’t an aquarium to put it in. But that didn’t mean it had to be broken, either. At least it wasn’t waterlogged, stinking of mildew.

‘…Whoa, whoa,’ Vega added. ‘You can look but you can’t touch, Esteban. Hands _off_ the merchandise.’

 _Yeah,_ Steve thought. _That’s the story of my life right now_. ‘So you just want to keep lugging this hunk of junk around with you everywhere?’ he asked instead.

Vega shrugged, holding something so close to the chest Steve couldn’t figure out what it was. ‘I’m not a fish person. They’re always staring atcha. Gives me the willies.’

Like he didn’t enjoy the attention.

Steve smiled anyway.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Anyway, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ Vega added, conveniently ignoring the part where it _was_ broken. He nudged the Normandy replica aside to make room on the table, then put his goods down.

They were groceries.

Needless to say, it was unexpectedly domestic.

‘I know how you feel about my cooking, Esteban,’ Vega said. ‘And me? I’m just tired of eating the same shit day in and day out.’

‘Yeah.’ Steve watched as Vega pulled out a hot-plate next, old and about as busted as the aquarium VI looked, but a hundred times as useful—if it _did_ work. ‘You’re a growing boy with a healthy appetite. I know.’

‘Heh.’ Vega found their power strip, messing with it for a few seconds, trying to get it to respond. From zero-eighteen hundred to zero-nineteen hundred, everybody was using, and there was only so much electric to go around. Then, the buzzing started; Vega only had to hit the thing twice, which for him, for _them_ , had to be a record of some sort.

‘You’re a whiz,’ Steve said. ‘Of course, you couldn’t have asked _me_ to take care of that for you or anything. It’s not as though I’m good at it, right?’

‘How about you just sit there and look pretty?’ Vega replied. ‘Relax or something—if you even know how.’

‘Coming from you, Vega, that’s really something.’ Steve didn’t grab the only chair in the room. Sitting on Vega’s bed was…an option, but not surprisingly he hadn’t made it that morning, and Steve wasn’t at a place yet where he felt like doing that for him every day: running his hands over the sheet that was still warm, the pillow that had a big dark dip in the center. And he shouldn’t be at that place, _ever_ ; Steve didn’t want it and Vega didn’t want it. If he did something like that, it’d have to be for a different reason.

But Vega’s bed wasn’t warm right now. It might’ve been safe. Steve’s other options were limited; he couldn’t lean against Vega’s table—something Vega’d picked up and repurposed, something that used to be worth so much more than its current uses, although it _did_ match the ship model.

If you squinted halfway to closing your eyes, that is.

Steve didn’t bother. He’d already looked at things from every angle while trying to resolve them into shapes that made more sense than they ever would, and eventually he sat down on the edge of Vega’s cot, elbows on his knees, thumb tucked against thumb. It was hard beneath him, cutting into the backs of his thighs.

‘I’d return the favor someday,’ he said, ‘but cooking isn’t exactly one of my…talents.’

‘This ain’t about that.’ Vega tapped the hotplate, testing to see if it was hot enough yet. It sizzled against his finger and he brought it to his mouth, sucking on it and saying _damn_ but not saying _ow_. ‘Shit. Little bastard gets _hot_.’ It clattered up on the table, along with a frying pan and something like a spatula.

‘Okay,’ Steve said. ‘What _is_ it about?’

‘Nothin’ but the _huevos_ , Esteban,’ Vega replied.

If it were any other day— _BD_ , Allers’s operation was calling it; _Before the Decision_ —then Steve could’ve brought himself to believe it. What was a little home-cooking between two friends? But back on the Normandy there were all the supplies they needed right there; all Steve had to do was order something extra on the acquisitions form, _if_ Vega gave him enough of a head’s up in advance for him to sneak it on.

The first time, Steve expected them to come out burnt and too nasty to eat. _I can fix that_ turned into James kicking something until it sputtered to life again; _You wanna see my moves_ always ended up with _somebody_ in the medical bay, Dr. Chakwas looking reasonably put-out; and there was no reason why _It’s time for you to try my famous huevos rancheros_ wouldn’t end up the same way, with Steve scraping them out to the Commander’s hamster when nobody was looking.

Back then, it was easy. Now, it was more than ten times as complicated. Steve had to wonder where Vega got the eggs, how he managed to get that hot plate, where the pan and spatula came from—whether it was on loan or his to keep. These things mattered, small as they were, because they were the only things people had to sort out anymore, the only things they could understand.

Something shiny like oil hit the pan. It sizzled. It didn’t smell so great but Vega was cracking eggs, small as they were, straight on top.

‘You like ‘em nice and hot, right, Esteban?’ Vega asked.

It was classic Vega. He couldn’t say a damn thing without making it into innuendo; the problem was that he didn’t realize he was doing it half the time, and figuring out which half was which demanded instincts in top-condition, honed and polished and ready to see some action.

‘You know I do,’ Steve replied.

Vega chuckled, his back to Steve as he bent over the hot-plate. ‘Well too bad, ‘cause I don’t have any salsa. Gonna have to make do with this bottle of Tabasco and some jerky instead of the tortillas.’ He shook his head at that, the tattoo on the side of his neck straining, then relaxing, then straining again. ‘Whatever. I’ll improvise. I _like_ improvising.’

 _You can’t kick huevos into being huevos rancheros, Vega_ , Steve thought, but didn’t say it. Actually, at the moment, it kind of felt like he could.

The smell was better than what Steve was usually met with for dinner—a big screaming nothing, taste that hit in the back of the throat instead of on the tip of the tongue, food that had to be washed down or else you realized how close you were to choking on it. This had flavor, and whether it was good or bad didn’t matter so much as the fact that it was different.

Also, Vega never burned his eggs.

That was something Steve appreciated more than the eggs themselves.

It wasn’t about the ingredients; it was about what you could do with them. Steve watched and Vega cooked. Halfway through the frying process, he used a plate to cover the frying pan, right after splashing some water inside from a thermos. Steve could still hear everything cooking underneath, muted and sizzling and spitting as it steamed and fried at the same time. Vega rubbed the back of his neck, hooking a finger into the collar and tugging it a couple of times, over a line of sweat.

The light in the room was dim, extra electricity mostly shunted to powering the hot-plate. As long as they didn’t take up more than their faire share, Steve couldn’t find it in himself to feel guilty. It was too warm, sure, but it was the first time they’d felt that way since…

 _Since_. It didn’t need clarification.

‘If you aren’t careful, everybody’s going to want a piece of that action,’ Steve said.

‘Story of my _life_ , Esteban.’ Vega let his collar snap back against his throat. When he turned—only a half-turn to glance over his shoulder, but still—Steve realized they were looking at each other.

In months of bad moments and dangerous ones, never the good kind of dangerous, anticipation being more about what could go wrong and what more they could lose and remembering everything they’d already lost than it was about hope anymore, it was a really _good_ moment. Private, but not lonely—and not hiding from anything, either. Vega had a look on his face Steve didn’t recognize, a face he _did_ recognize, a face he wouldn’t stop seeing for the rest of his life. However long that was, it was that ability to remember that stuck with him.

And they needed that: something to lean on, something to lean back. It wasn’t reliance. It was trust.

It was surprising. At the same time, it wasn’t.

‘Damn,’ Vega said, but it didn’t have its usual whatevers—its shields, mostly for deflection, only absorbing impact some of the time. ‘They’re just eggs, all right? You don’t gotta look at me like _that_ about ‘em.’

‘Nothing but the _huevos,_ Mr. Vega,’ Steve agreed. 

Vega blinked. He was close to being surprised—and maybe close to grinning, all in a split-second shift.

‘Not just any _huevos,_ though,’ he said.

‘Yeah. I guess you could say they’re pretty special ones,’ Steve replied.

That, and the whole rest of the bloc was going to be jealous once they smelled it. They all shared space, noise, frustration, lights-out hours, curfews—but this was something they couldn’t get in on automatically. Steve’s stomach flipped over when Vega checked how the eggs were doing, when he turned off the hot plate and said, ‘Blew my load on everything else. Don’t have any more plates. Sooo… We’re gonna have to eat it right out of the pan. Nothin’ too fancy.’

‘I thought you didn’t like sharing,’ Steve said.

‘Forks are one thing. I don’t mean anything by it.’ Vega ran his palm over his head, from the nape of his neck up to the sort-of Mohawk in the front, not enough to make it messy. Steve imagined doing the same thing with his own hands and it wasn’t the first time he’d pictured it, but his thumb was only pressed into the soft web of flesh between his fingers, rubbing the little reminder of a pulse that kept even time over there.

‘Uh-huh,’ Steve said. ‘Come on, admit it—you’re just making the rules up as you go along.’

‘Who said there were rules?’ Vega asked. ‘I didn’t hear anything about _rules_. And if I did, I wasn’t listening.’

 _So there_ , he might have said. Steve pinched the same skin between his fingers, enough to serve as another reminder—before Vega served the eggs.

They didn’t look the way Steve remembered them. Not much did. When Vega caught sight of them, lifting a brow and snorting some air from a flared nostril, Steve knew he was thinking the same thing. They weren’t about to lie about it, but Steve couldn’t help bowing his head and chuckling.

‘You laughing at my _huevos_ , Esteban?’ Vega asked.

‘No,’ Steve said. ‘I’m laughing at the two people about to eat them.’

Vega—probably because he couldn’t decide if this was more insulting or less—couldn’t find the right reaction. Steve’s words caught him before he bristled, before he took offense. And then the time was in the past, the cue already missed.

Nothing happened.  

The sauce was hot enough that it made Steve’s eyes prickle close to something like tears; he had to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand and pinch the bridge of his nose instead of the vulnerable spot between his thumb and forefinger to clear his head. Even Vega coughed after his first bite, clapping himself on his chest, pounding something free. He was still sweating, but it wasn’t for the usual reason—a work-out that lasted too long—and Steve didn’t have a towel to pass him. Steve was sweating too. He tried Vega’s technique for it, tugging at the front of his shirt, the top button of his collar already undone, and cool air shifted down the front of his chest where it was on its way to being too-warm.

‘It’s good,’ Steve said. ‘I think it’s trying to finish what the reapers didn’t, but… It’s good.’

‘Just good?’ Vega asked, and it felt like a challenge.

Steve thought about kissing him—right now, after all this time, only it wasn’t _that_ long, not when you put it into perspective. Both of them were a lot older than they’d known each other, after all. And no part of it was more than a speck of dust in somebody’s eye.

But there was a balance, something going on. The question of whether or not Vega was ready. When a guy did things half and half then obviously you couldn’t trust which half was serious and which was fucking around—aimless, directionless, pointless. Lonely.

They could do this. It was so damn easy to get things wrong.

Steve rubbed his thigh with his palm. For once, Vega was watching him, low in the shadows—without blinking too hard.

Maybe it was just the eggs, but he was starting to look serious.

‘Hey,’ Kaidan said, from over by the hole in the wall, leaning against it with his good arm. Steve was reminded of what they all had to lean on, of what they didn’t. ‘I thought I smelled… Something burning, actually. I guess I was wrong. Don’t let me interrupt.’

‘What you smelled—that’s just Vega’s cooking,’ Steve said. He’d looked up already, and when he looked back, Vega was scraping his eggs around in the pan, shoveling another bite into his mouth, staring at them with the same expression. So it could’ve been the eggs. It really could’ve been. ‘It looks worse than it smells, but it tastes better than both.’

‘We got extra, if you want some,’ Vega added. ‘Come on. I’ll deal you in, just like old times.’

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan said, taking a step into the room. ‘Just like old times.’

It wasn’t, Steve thought. Not at all.

But that was okay, too.

*


	9. VAKARIAN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garrus wakes up missing his face, as usual.

When Garrus woke, it was to a feeling like he was missing more _face_ than usual.

Turians were difficult to make a dent in. They had skin closer to metal than anything else, but you couldn’t really describe it in those terms. It was sharp, occasionally toxic to the touch, hard and unflinching. It didn’t scar easy, but when it _did_ scar, those moments could last a Krogan lifetime.

Shepard had a few scars of his own. Nothing big. Nothing too obvious. When the going got tough, Shepard got going, so they all said—with a certain reverence that was nearly too difficult to contest—and, now and then, a few of his choices showed right there on his face. Not _quite_ as impressive as taking a rocket to the mandible, but it came close.

Shepard was always close.

Garrus breathed. He could definitely feel a once-relevant, though not invaluable, portion of his face missing—but then, what else was new?

Those were the stakes. As long as he gave better than he got, the balance wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Neither was the scar tissue.

It had texture. Shepard had even complimented it once—and it was better than being bare-faced, after all. It was better that their choices showed, that they didn’t try to hide them.

Garrus had tried hiding.

It hadn’t worked out for him. It turned out Turians weren’t small enough to lay low.

When Garrus opened his eyes, he didn’t recognize his surroundings. He was nearly certain he wouldn’t recognize his face, either—whatever was left of it—when he saw it. There was a ceiling above his head, sound filtering in from somewhere else and a heaviness sitting on his chest, but all those sensations, finicky as they were, meant that he was alive.

So long as there was something left to scar, then people generally kept trying.

He flexed his fingers. Those moved, all three of them on one hand. That was an inspirational sign, though the rapid beeping that followed wasn’t.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice as dry as the desert on Tuchanka. An unfortunate comparison, as it reminded him of the locals, but it had to be made. There was no better way to describe it, or that lingering and unpleasant weight settling in to his joints, much like the cold. ‘I _am_ alive.’

Taking shots in the dark was part of his specialty. Missing was no longer an option.

Shadows fell over him. Doctors, he assumed, or nurses. Certainly not enemies. _Clearly_ not more Krogans.

They were too quiet for that.

‘Don’t be so surprised,’ he added. ‘It was a lucky guess.’

He remembered the heat. He remembered the pain. He remembered Shepard and the knowledge—perhaps even the acceptance—that he was already gone, his square shoulders set in the distance, telling them to run. No matter how many times Garrus proved he was better than him, Shepard always found a way to keep one step ahead.

Garrus remembered the acceptance. Then, he remembered nothing else.

That lack of memory was a lightness neither more nor less unpleasant than the heaviness. It was equally balanced.

Garrus also remembered watching, from a vantage-point too low to the ground, thinking about the time on the Citadel when Shepard had missed the shot. He wouldn’t miss when it wasn’t between friends, of course; that was more than just unlikely. But still, seeing the man go in alone and knowing that he had to were moments beyond memory _or_ understanding.

 _Stubborn_.

Garrus’s vision cleared. There was more than one point to focus on; too many of them clouded his perspective. Aim required clarity and distinction, so _that_ was out of the picture, at least for the time being.

‘Do you know where you are?’ someone asked him.

Salarian. Garrus would know those voices anywhere. Meticulous and proud, so long as they weren’t singing.

Then again, Garrus had only known one Salarian to do _that_.

‘Why don’t _you_ tell _me_ ,’ Garrus said, ‘and then I’ll tell you if my guess was right.’

The Salarian didn’t laugh. They rarely did. ‘This is the Waterloo Memorial Field Hospital,’ he said. ‘You were very nearly dead—for a turian.’

‘Damn,’ Garrus replied. ‘It seems I wasn’t even close.’

As little face as he had left, what remained was still moving—and he was still forming words. The skin was taut and pain lingered at the edges of that sensation, draw tight across the bone beneath.

‘Tell me,’ Garrus said, ‘how much of my face is gone?’

He knew the Salarian would be incapable of giving anything other than an unfailingly specific answer. ‘I would say, based on close observation, that the percentage is not insignificant. Somewhere between forty-six and forty-eight of the right side _is_ missing. Appears there was damage done to a pre-existing skin graft. Do you recall the name that you were given, or shall we call you _John Shepard_ for now?’

Garrus’s smiles were neither few nor far between but the mandibles tended to mask their presence, making them seem like something else less obvious than they were. Now, he didn’t have the luxury. He didn’t feel like smiling, either. ‘Tarquin,’ he said, having realized some time ago that he had a marginally perverse penchant for nicknames. ‘…Tarquin Victus.’

‘Very good,’ the Salarian replied. ‘One moment, Tarquin Victus. Entering your data. Please, no sudden movements—you might get dizzy.’

He was writing things down, distracted. Garrus stared at the ceiling only to see it move; what he thought might be a hallucination based on physical damage—it seemed unlikely so much of his face would be gone while both his lucky turian eyes remained unharmed—was in fact just part of the architecture. He was under a tent, the tarp snapping with a sudden wind.

That explained the cold.

‘My colleagues will be arriving shortly,’ the Salarian continued. ‘They are…very excited to learn you’ve, shall we say, made it?’

‘That makes two of us, I’m sure,’ Garrus replied.

‘Touch and go. Turian anatomy isn’t our specialty.’ The Salarian’s voice held the same trance-like quality as whatever machines surrounded them—none of them with the vibration of the final roar, each wave of piercing light, each fired beam and the scorching heat that followed, even the predictable rhythm unavoidable because of its power and speed, and the final deafening explosion that razed them all, when Garrus was reminded of just how fragile human bodies _really_ were. Shepard, lifted in the air, tossed forward and beaten sky-high, and no way to tell whether it was fabric or flesh being torn to shreds as Garrus, too, succumbed to the sheer force of it all.

Man up. Turian down. This was always something Shepard had needed to do alone. And Garrus understood it. He liked to think he understood it better than anyone else.

That didn’t mean he had to _like_ it.

When he turned his head, the pain became more acute. The beeping quickened. He could hear some commotion nearby and imagined the salarians, their heads bowed together, in typical salarian conference over atypical turian anatomy.

Some things never changed.

Shepard had died to protect that.

Garrus allowed the words to make themselves known as more than _just words_ , a state of truth, a reality of the galaxies they now inhabited. Whatever came, whatever had passed and whatever waited on the horizon, this was their inheritance. Whatever Shepard had done…

Obviously, it had worked.

‘Tell me,’ Garrus said, as his doctors gathered close, ‘what have I missed? I get the feeling it’s a lot.’

So they told him.

About the relays. About the Citadel. About _the_ Commander Shepard, whose body was never found but whose sacrifice was understood and praised in a way only the dead could ever claim. About the synthetics and about that final second in battle when all seemed lost—when, suddenly, the Reapers fell. All the while, they checked his vitals, and Garrus’s heartbeat didn’t kick out of time or pick up its pace when he heard what he already knew, down below the ruined skin-graft, even deeper than bone.

Yet turians were stubborn—maybe not in the same way krogans or salarians or _council members_ were stubborn, but they were stubborn enough. And Garrus in particular had always enjoyed knowing the title was his. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Just like Shepard.

 _He owed me a drink_ , Garrus thought. Those things left unfinished but not unsaid were…unfortunate, because they gave a stubborn turian reason to be more stubborn than ever.

It was possible Garrus owed _Shepard_ that drink. Wherever he was, Garrus _had_ promised to meet him there.

One of them wasn’t making good on their end of the bargain. That didn’t sit right. Garrus asked how much time he had left in observation and special care and the salarians conferred for a while longer in hushed voices they probably assumed he couldn’t hear. When they passed into a certain part of his field of vision it was like they’d disappeared.

It was possible Garrus was missing part of his eye, the one on the right side, which was always his blind spot to begin with. Hence the missile he took to the face.

His situation was unpleasant, but it wasn’t dire.

Wasn’t that _always_ the way.

‘Some time yet,’ the first Salarian told him, a long while later. Night must have fallen, because everything was darker now. The bleeping had slowed along with the rise and fall of Garrus’s chest, under the heaviness that remained—like that time James Vega asked Pilot Steve Cortez to sit on top of him while he did push-ups to make the task more difficult and, presumably, more meaningful. There was a rumbling noise coming from nearby just like a Krogan snoring—when Wrex and Grunt slept on the Normandy, the entire ship knew—and maybe that was exactly what it was, here in the Waterloo Memorial Field Hospital, where they had all kinds of patients. It made sense, grim and determined and gritty as sense ever was, that Garrus wasn’t the only fallen soldier in these times, and also that he might be one of the few who had a chance to rise again. But he didn’t want it—not alone. ‘There used to be a river here, you know. The Thames. Famous for such a long time, but now…’ Garrus could hear the Salarian sigh, very quietly, but loud enough to make the snoring unimportant. ‘Well. We’re very lucky there’s still a river-bed, aren’t we?’

‘Without a river to go in it?’ Garrus replied. ‘That’s a _strange_ way of looking at luck, if you ask me.’

*


	10. ALENKO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan doesn't like being right.

There was something going on—something between Steve and James Vega.

It was easier to see these things when you _weren’t_ in the middle of them. Kaidan wanted to use that as an excuse for why he hadn’t figured it out earlier for himself, but really, he had no excuses. Not anymore.

Kaidan also wanted to tell them, whatever it was, to go for it. They didn’t know how long they had; they didn’t know what could happen later or even tomorrow. They just didn’t know anything.

What was the point of making all those mistakes if nobody ever learned from them?

But the words died on Kaidan’s tongue when he tried to let them out, during the dinners they ate together. Just a pilot, a soldier and a marine, like the start of a joke in Allers’s daily news bulletin. When he tried to chuckle at the thought, a hit of tabasco knocked him square in the back of his throat and the others had to watch him choke, thinking it was about all the things he couldn’t handle instead of all the things he couldn’t share.

It wasn’t Kaidan’s place to say anything. They could waste all the time they had because that was what people were good for, apparently.

And when he thought like that, he tended not to make it outside until later in the day, not because his limbs were too heavy but because the sunlight felt wrong. He didn’t want to feel it.

By that point, the days themselves were getting shorter, winding out of summer and heading into something closer to fall. Not that they could tell, because the trees were all bare and burnt and black like they’d just come out of winter instead of the other way around. Some of the buildings were more than halfway repaired, but the farther out they got from the radius of Piccadilly and Leicester and the National Gallery, the trinity of London relief efforts, the less obvious the signs were.

It was dangerous out there. Kaidan was recuperating and he wasn’t supposed to go alone.

Steve went with him a lot of the time, nothing but walking. Maybe he had his own advice he thought wasn’t his place to give, about what it meant to lose somebody the way they’d both lost…somebody. If Kaidan thought it would help, he would’ve taken it, no hesitations, only a few more questions asked.

He just wanted to know it was going to be all right. But the truth was, he knew it wouldn’t be. And this wasn’t a shocking revelation, either. He’d known for a long time.

That was what it all came down to. What Kaidan knew, what he’d believed, how he’d prepared—and how he had to live with it after. How he had to force himself into healing when everything inside felt like doing the opposite.

His bruises were fading. His headaches came and went. His biotics were in good shape; every time the Asari nurse checked up on him she was pleased, said it was _lucky_ , and Kaidan gave her a tight smile instead of a wince.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lucky. Thanks. Thank you.’

He stared at his own progress report to understand the statistics of his body, what he could and couldn’t do. _Limitations_. The physical therapy was something he thought maybe he could work on with Vega, out in back where he exercised every day, but then he realized _that_ was out of the question. If Kaidan wanted to feel inadequate, then sure—but if he wanted to start small and doable, he’d stick to lifting a few simple weights with his bad arm in the privacy of his own room, the separator drawn, pain-sweat beading on the side of his throat. And when Steve came in to ask him how he was doing, Kaidan said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing great.’

 _Lucky_ , even.

They both meant the same thing when they weren’t, actually, the truth.

He lifted the weight, just a hunk of scrap metal that hadn’t been melted down and repurposed, to prove the point. His elbow didn’t pop. His fingers were closed tight around something cool his palm had made warm.

Steve offered him a smile that wasn’t pitying or sad but a little proud of what he figured Kaidan had already accomplished.

Just waking up and swinging his legs over the bed was hard enough. Steve got it. He didn’t say anything other than, ‘That’s great— That’s great to hear.’

‘Anyway, I won’t be taking up your space for much longer,’ Kaidan added. ‘It’s not like I want to overstay my welcome.’

‘Hey, don’t worry about it.’ Steve pushed his already rolled up sleeve higher over his elbow; Kaidan hadn’t seen it slipping. ‘You know it’s fine, right?’

There was a time Kaidan would’ve given anything to have the excuse to be with somebody alone, without all the usual suspects hanging around too. There was always at least one other person in the picture, watching the sandstorm on Mars, adding to the conversation, blowing even the pretense of privacy wide open and stacking up those chances Kaidan never took because he never had them in the first place. There were so many of those—and nobody showed up injured and bruised to force them into sharing close quarters. Maybe, if they had, Kaidan would’ve been able to think the word _lucky_ without feeling his skin tug at the bruises, his mouth settling into a hard line.

‘Just don’t do me any favors,’ Kaidan said. ‘You’ve got…something good working out for you here.’

‘Right. In the shelter.’ Steve tilted his head to the side and Kaidan knew he wasn’t buying it.

But Kaidan’s arms were already too tired to do much shrugging. ‘Sure, okay. If you say so. But if I’m getting in the way—’

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Steve said. ‘Man, I’m itching to get out for a while. Feel like taking a walk with me, soldier?’

Kaidan said yes to the question like he always did. Saying no would be like shooting himself in the foot—something he hadn’t done literally for a long time.

All the resolutions he’d made before—they were calling it _BD_ , and even though it was hard to swallow, Kaidan could still get his mind around it, put his head somewhere in the game—didn’t have the same weight here. They didn’t have the same purpose. They didn’t have the one thing they needed, which was a name, the one on the back of a dog-tag that he’d managed to keep throughout the whole ordeal. A single, bent rectangle of stamped metal he couldn’t look at, especially not when it caught the light. Not anymore. He couldn’t keep it under his pillow, either, so he left it under the cot instead. It was pushed far enough beneath that he didn’t trip on it when he swung his legs over the side of the bed, just as simple as a grunt and a ‘Sorry for slowing you down, Steve.’

‘Slowing _me_ down?’ Steve gave his sleeve one final twist. This time, it held in place above the bone. ‘Who said anything about that? I’m the one who likes to take it slow these days. Stop and appreciate the view. …You know, the part of it we’ve still got left.’

It wasn’t all bad.

‘It’s okay,’ Kaidan said, not _it’s great_ or _it’s lucky_ or even _it’s good_. That was how they knew it was the truth, because it didn’t pretend to be anything better than it was—or anything worse.

It was closing in on dusk when they stepped outside, a little later than they usually were. In one direction they’d head to Piccadilly. In the other, they’d end up at the orphanage. There was one other field hospital across the river that wasn’t a river anymore, and all around them the shells of bombed out buildings were still dark shapes against the sky.

There was a third option, somewhere to the east, branching off from the gallery square.

‘Vega has this thing about Turians doing repair work,’ Steve said casually. ‘Some people just can’t see anybody else doing something right and they _have_ to do it for themselves.’

They were doing okay too, Kaidan thought. He just couldn’t get the word out anymore, and Steve let it slide.

Walking while thinking was hard enough. Walking while keeping up appearances _and_ a conversation… Some days, it seemed like it was always going to be impossible.

Kaidan stared at their options, then took the third, heading in the direction of somewhere else.

He could still feel it, the reverberations underneath their feet, the echoes in the sidewalks and the torn-up chunks of pavement. It wasn’t pretty; there was no gleam, no polish, nothing bright to sting your eyes from every engineered scenic viewpoint. Basically, it wasn’t the Presidium because that didn’t exist anymore. Neither did a café nobody would remember the same way they remembered the other monuments and memorials, all the places where shit _really_ went down instead of the places where two people finally shared a meal together.

Kaidan’s throat didn’t feel tight. He just didn’t think about the names, the sheen of starlight off the single rectangle of metal, and he was _okay_.

‘Haven’t been this far yet,’ Steve admitted. ‘Funny, isn’t it? Where your feet take you. All the routines you fall into without realizing.’

‘Funny isn’t the word I’d use,’ Kaidan replied. ‘Maybe… Maybe predictable. Maybe that’s more like it.’

‘You’re right about that.’ Steve was following him now, but Kaidan had no idea where he was taking them—just that it was down a wide street, and all the houses they passed weren’t even memories of their former selves. And Kaidan didn’t mind the perspective, what he had to see out here. The silence. It wasn’t as ugly as it seemed. At least it was honest. ‘But you can’t think of it like that forever. Eventually…something’s bound to surprise you. Shake you up a little. You know how it is.’

‘Do I?’ Kaidan asked. ‘Yeah. I guess I do.’

‘It doesn’t stop happening, you know.’ Steve stopped walking instead. There was a bench in front of them—untouched, not even scarred or scathed, without a single twist in or burn-mark on the metal. It was like it’d fallen straight out of the sky from another time, another place. Kaidan thought about ducking down behind it and taking cover—it’d be a good vantage point—but nobody was firing at him. Nobody he could see, anyway. Besides, his joints didn’t have the bend. He didn’t have the speed. He didn’t have the motivation, not anymore. ‘Hey—let’s sit for a while.’

Steve sat first. Kaidan knew it was to show it was all right, that he was doing it for himself and not for anybody else.

‘We don’t have to stop,’ Kaidan said. ‘Not on my account. All the nurses say it’s better to do a little extra each time.’

‘And they’d be right.’ Steve waved him over. Kaidan still couldn’t move. ‘It looks better from down here, Kaidan. Trust me.’

That wasn’t the problem. What Kaidan trusted, what Kaidan knew—that was never in doubt. He just didn’t want to trust it or know it, and he was being stubborn; he was being worse than somebody else he once knew, a guy who had to pretend all the way up until the end that they were going to see each other again when both of them knew they weren’t.

‘He said he was gonna meet me,’ Kaidan said. ‘After everything was over. And I— I didn’t even believe him.’

‘You know, it sucks to be right,’ Steve replied.

Kaidan took a step forward, then sideways. His knee creaked when it bent, but he made it onto the bench without any trouble, one stiff hand resting with the knuckles curled and swollen on top of his thigh.

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan said. ‘Don’t I know it.’

*


	11. VEGA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James's back hurts. Steve takes care of that.

James could still taste the Tabasco.

It was the first decent meal he’d had in _way_ too long. Not to give himself _too_ many props or anything, but his cooking had something to do with it—even if he could only go so far with the ingredients he had to work with.

It tasted good. That was all the mattered. Spicy, hot. It burned in his mouth and settled in his stomach, and that night he didn’t listen to the noises his gut made before he spread out on his back, one elbow over the edge of his cot, and fell asleep.

He listened to Steve shifting in the cot across the way instead. And sleeping didn’t come so easy.

In the morning he did twice the usual number of reps. Chin-ups, sit-ups and push-ups. Everything _ups_ , even the stuff that was low down to the ground. He did his laundry and his rounds, once past the orphanage listening to all the noise inside. Everything sounded copacetic, somewhere better than okay.

By the afternoon his body was sore in a way it hadn’t been since they were hauling ass all over the galaxy, sweet-talking Krogans— _nobody_ was good at that—and siccing Thresher Maws on Reapers, curing the Genophage and losing Palaven. All of the old times, the good stuff.

And James was beginning to think he’d never see that kind of action again.

Nobody said he wasn’t supposed to miss it. That was implied. What they fought for was what they _got_ , and there wasn’t any room for being disappointed.

It didn’t make a lick of sense.

James’s sides were aching, the muscles he hadn’t pushed to their limits in too long reminding him they were there and they could get mad as hell when he wasn’t respectful.

Good. At least they still knew what being mad was. At least he could still breathe heavy for a reason other than all the smog in the air, one of those famous things about London they _didn’t_ put in the pictures or in the tourist info.

James always thought it was supposed to be pretty. Obviously, after the Reapers were through making a wasteland of it, it wouldn’t be—but he couldn’t imagine getting to the point where it might be again, no matter how many sunsets they went through, no matter how many Turians broke their hammers trying.

Maybe it hadn’t been so great in the first place. Maybe they were looking to rebuild something that never was.

Maybe it was better this way.

And maybe it wasn’t just the muscles in James’s sides that hurt but the muscles in his head. Sometimes his brain felt like it was the one doing twice as many reps, upping the ante every twenty-four hours, to say nothing of how hard his heart was beating.

But James didn’t believe in days off, in resting. He believed in poker and _huevos rancheros_ and relaxing after he’d pushed too hard, everything all at once, all in the same long day.

There was no such thing as going too far. There was no such thing as stopping.

There were groceries on his table when he got back to the shelter and spare parts next to the aquarium VI, something that looked like a wrench but probably wasn’t.

There was no Steve, and James missed him—not like a hole but like something that’d been covered up half-assed with a tarp and some tack, like a hammer slipping in his hands, like something he still had left to finish without knowing how to begin.

Yeah. James’s head hurt. He picked up the not-a-wrench and tossed it from one hand to the other, then put it back down again, not knowing whether or not it was in the same place as before.

The aquarium VI wasn’t fixed, but one of the dents in the model Normandy SR-2’s four miniature antiproton thrusters had been patiently hammered flat again.

It was always hammers.

James picked that up next, not the first model ship he’d owned but the first one he’d inherited. It was small, light in his hands, barely weighing anything at all. He wondered how much it’d cost, how many credits Shepard had forked over for it—and _why_. Shepard had the ship itself, the real deal, so what the hell did he need with something that’d make him feel too big, like he just didn’t fit? Or was it that the real deal made him feel too small?

The way James saw it, he could do one of two things: put the ship up on a stand now that _somebody_ had gone and fixed the dents, show it off, keep it on display—or give it away to a better home. Let some kid who didn’t have anything else play with it. Mess it up, zoom it around, do all the noises. Crash it into the ground just _like_ the real deal, only with fewer sparks in the end.

They’d love that ship. They’d recognize it. And James didn’t want to get sentimental or anything, but it’d keep the Commander behind it alive—in a manner of speaking.

Dead, but not gone.

It was the least they could do.

James put the model ship back down. There had to be something to cover it up with, to get it out of the way of making dinner and working with the hot plate. Obviously the groceries were some kind of suggestion—although Steve could’ve just _said_ he was hungry for more.

James could hear it in his voice. _Hey—we should do this again sometime._

The back of James’s right deltoid twitched. He reached over to rub the pain out, thumb digging in where it hurt the most, but it twisted him up all wrong trying to work through it. On his own, he couldn’t get the right angle.

‘You look like you could use some help with that,’ Steve said from close by, somewhere over James’s shoulder.

James’s deltoid didn’t stop twitching. If anything, it was getting worse. He smoothed his fingers out over the cotton and muscle and he almost reached the right spot. Almost, but not quite.

‘… _But_ if I know you, Mr. Vega—and I think I do—you aren’t going to take me up on that offer.’ James could hear Steve walking in. He turned, arm still twisted up, like he _was_ patting himself on the back. ‘Just felt like looking to see if I could round up something a little less… _Tabasco_ than Tabasco. Turns out I couldn’t. And now I’m pretty sure some people think I’m crazy—crazier than they already did, anyway.’

‘You _are_ crazy,’ James said.

Not _loco_. But close.

‘Yeah, well, they had no idea where I was getting fresh eggs from to begin with.’ Steve glanced at James’s hand and he finally dropped it. ‘You have any idea about that?’

‘You accusin’ me of something, Esteban?’ James asked. ‘Cause if you are, you might as well come out and _say_ it.’

‘Not every question’s an accusation,’ Steve said.

‘Just most of ‘em,’ James replied.

Steve sighed, coming close to rolling his eyes. They were big and blue and they didn’t always take James by surprise—although he did always notice them. There had to be a difference in there somewhere worth a damn but it was a knot James couldn’t reach, either, couldn’t work out with his hands alone. Some things were too small; some things were too big.

‘See something you don’t like?’ Steve asked.

James realized he was staring. ‘It ain’t that,’ he said.

It was pretty much the opposite. And the truth stuck in his throat like the grit always did. James knew if he swallowed he could choke on it—that it was the small stuff that always took big things down. Same with Shepard and the Reapers; same with hammers and Turians. Same with the model Normandy, maybe, although how that fit into everything wasn’t as obvious as the rest.

‘Guess you didn’t pick up anything to drink,’ James added, while Steve watched him with those eyes. James felt them everywhere they landed, on his face mostly, probably picking up on all the _small stuff_ , like the scars James touched in the night with his thumb. It wasn’t too surprising that he couldn’t feel anything there, all dead tissue, so he had to keep reminding himself of what he had. What his face looked like. The pieces of himself he’d lost along the way and the other pieces he’d built up twice—no, ten _times_ as strong. They were all him, one hundred percent, and one hundred percent natural. He knew how wide his shoulders were and the exact shape cut across his right cheekbone all the way to the bridge of his nose.

He knew the hurt. He knew the result.

‘No _cerveza_ this time,’ Steve said. ‘I like it better when you’re talking, not the beer.’

‘You would,’ James said.

‘I do,’ Steve agreed.

‘Yeah,’ James added, but it wasn’t the banter he needed, just this word that fell flat. He moved toward the hotplate instead but Steve cleared his throat.

‘Let’s try this again.’ Steve’s eyes were on James’s back, right on the spot that hurt. Not that it was _hurting_ , exactly; it just bothered him more than it usually did, which was a whole different relay. ‘You look like you could use some help with that.’

‘Thought you wanted some of my famous _huevos_ again.’ James jerked his thumb to the groceries. ‘’Fact, you made it pretty obvious that’s _exactly_ what you wanted.’

‘The _huevos_ can wait, Vega,’ Steve said.

In all the time they’d been on the ship together, James rubbing at his own shoulder halfway down the shuttle bay from where Steve was taking care of his own business—and Steve noticing, sharp-eyed and clear, since his _job_ was picking out stuff they might run into and navigating around it—he’d never once offered something like this.

At least, James had to figure he meant a backrub.

It didn’t sound so bad right about now, either. Somebody else’s hands making sure everything was still there, even the dead scar tissue, the skin that wasn’t skin anymore.

Through the tee James was wearing—but _still_.

James could feel that skin start to prickle under the already sweaty cotton. He hadn’t changed yet, and he was close to just pulling the shirt off and saying _to hell with it_ , only something held him back. He blamed the ship. He blamed thinking.

All too often, that got in the way of doing.

So James sat down on the one chair they had, knees spread open, trying to remember what it felt like to relax. If this’d been one of the docking bays back on the Citadel and there’d been a poker table in front of him, a bunch of cards laid out and credit chits spread around next to those, he would’ve been able to grunt and sigh and shake everything loose. Hell, he wouldn’t have needed the rub down to begin with.  

Then again, if this’d been one of the docking bays, nobody would’ve been standing behind him, sleeves rolled up to their elbows—except maybe Shepard, leaning in just a little closer to check out James’s hand.

And that was different, too.

He could feel it before Steve even touched him, before he dropped that final distance and settled in with palms that weren’t as warm as they might’ve been, pressed on either side of James’s neck. James knew what his pulse did when he was hit with a shot of adrenaline—still all natural—and this was it, the rush and the thrill he couldn’t get anywhere else, at least outside of wartime.

Sometimes he faked it ‘til he made it, getting his blood up, pumping as much iron as he could. He could hear the kids laughing while they played with rocks and Turian-busted hammers and whatever else they shouldn’t be messing with that they needed to pretend were toys.

Yeah, James thought. He was gonna have to give that model ship away. Only problem was they’d all want it, and a lot of somebodies were gonna end up disappointed.

Then, skin to skin, Steve’s right thumb brushed over James’s second-favorite tattoo.

It used to be his first favorite. But that was before he got his N-7 one, way back in Cargo Hold C, what felt like a lifetime ago. Even the pain had dulled into nothing—nothing that mattered, anyway.

Now it was all healed up and it wasn’t something people saw all too often, not like the one on James’s throat. That was for flash, for show, for proving he had what it took to hurt. And Steve’s thumb, no nail, pushed against the flesh, where there wasn’t any ink, where there wasn’t any close-shaved stubble, where it was just the vein and the pulse and the adrenaline and everything _all natural_.

James’s mouth was dry. It wasn’t the first time. He couldn’t swallow but it wasn’t because of the grit; the whole thing was a fucking bad idea but then again, so was everything he did. _I made a few mistakes in my time, Loco_ , he remembered telling Shepard once, but he had to be drunk to admit it, woozy and grinning and just having beat Major Alenko at cards six ways to Sunday. No mercy. Not on the Normandy.

 _It’s the mistakes you don’t make that you’ll regret the most, James_ , Shepard told him.

James laughed at the time, tipping his beer. _I’ll drink to that_ , he’d said.

‘This it?’ Steve asked, digging his knuckles into the spot.

Like he didn’t already know.

‘ _Shit_ , yeah,’ James said. He felt the muscles protest, flexing and stiffening up; he heard the chair scrape while he _almost_ shifted gravity and leaned all the way forward to get away from the touch. Steve let up but James didn’t want him to. He’d taken worse. He knew he could take this. Even if he couldn’t, he’d work it out.

He needed to work it out.

Steve didn’t let up for long. He was a pretty ruthless guy, going straight for the knot, bracing one hand at the back of James’s neck while the other had at it. James grunted a couple of times, nothing big, nothing close to a wince or anything, and finally—it took a lot of effort and he didn’t know why—he bowed his head into it, chin hiding in nothing but shadow.

It was dark. He could smell his own sweat. He closed his eyes and Steve gave him this little rub with the fingers he was using to brace himself while his knuckles just kept going at it, deeper and deeper.

It felt good—but not the kind of _good_ Alenko was always using to say _Don’t ask me anymore, I’m not okay_ and not the kind of _good_ they bargained around like the new version of credit chits. _How you doing? I’m good, man, I can’t complain._ Or _How’s this look? It’s good, right? Yeah, sure, it’s good._ It was a catch-all but it didn’t mean anything, and at the end of the day all the goods came up empty, just like James’s hotplate.

‘Yeah, I can feel it,’ Steve said. He didn’t ask, _Is this good?_ James was grateful for that. Actually, he was grateful for a lot of things, Steve’s hands among ‘em, sliding his fingers around to James’s shoulder and holding on tight. The chair rocked, one leg that much longer than the other legs, enough to make it bounce. James’s weight was also enough to brace it, but not all the time. Not all the way. There were moments it didn’t cut it and those moments made him feel like he wasn’t even on the ground.

No gravity situation. Free-falling. Out there in space.

The back of James’s neck strained. ‘Hey, relax,’ Steve said, somewhere closer to James’s ear than he’d expected. Breath and callused fingers and soft palms.

It could go on forever or it could stop, but there wasn’t any in-between.

Everything that’d been hard was starting to get soft and some things that should’ve stayed soft had started to get hard. James realized his own elbow was jammed into his thigh from how he was leaning on it. ‘C’mon, straighten up or you really will throw your back out,’ Steve said, both hands on James’s shoulders, at the caps of James’s sleeves, then on his biceps. He helped out with the alignment.

For old times’ sake, James said, ‘Aw, Esteban. You really _do_ care.’

It was just one of those things.

Steve gave his biceps a squeeze. ‘How’s that working for you?’ he asked.

‘It’s good,’ James said, hating the taste of it in his mouth. That word that didn’t mean anything, that had no size at all.

*


	12. CORTEZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and James ask each other about how they got their scars. Everyone pretends I didn't post that chapter to the wrong story first.

They had James’s revised _huevos_ together again. That wasn’t all they were having, apparently, but the rest of it wasn’t on the menu.

Aside from the Tabasco and some eggs James had obviously picked up on the black market using his ‘ _connections_ ,’ whatever they were, respect was all they had to swallow. Respecting each other was what they had to go by. Respecting distance, boundaries, the lines they drew to make rooming together comfortable, and all the in-betweens involved.

Steve had known a lot of guys like James in his time—not exactly like him, but close. They talked the talk and they even knew how to walk the walk; they could fill up a room better than anybody else, but it was all shadow-boxing and Steve knew _that_ , too. He wasn’t about to ask for connection when the feint and the jab and the one-two and the duck were all he was getting in the long run.

He wasn’t looking to get punched in the face.  

It was a dance, kind of, one where everybody knew the part he was playing. When to enter—and, more importantly, when to exit. Steve understood his cues, the ones James was giving him, and how much it meant for him to show whatever vulnerability he _did_ have.

Hard as it was to believe, with a body like that.

Hard as it was for Steve not to push his fingers up under the hem of James’s t-shirt sleeves and feel for himself how low the tattoos went over his shoulder blades, where the muscles splayed out over the backs of his ribs, and everything was thick, well-trained, lovingly cared for.

Except for all the times James pushed himself too hard, of course. It was the finesse he was still lacking, and that was a sign of youth.

The backaches were a sign of age.

It couldn’t be easy. Not that it was for any of them, but this in particular had its fair share of bruises. And James had his fair share of _huevos_ , maybe more than his fair share. And Steve had his own share, whatever that was.

At least both of them had a decent dinner, James coughing and banging himself on the chest to clear out the lingering taste of Tabasco.

‘You know, I was thinking about giving that thing away,’ James said, while Steve checked the time and realized they were past electricity curfew, dimming their lights just a step before out so they didn’t bang into anything in the dark—or, God forbid, into each other. ‘The Normandy. I dunno, it just doesn’t go with the décor, does it?’

‘I wouldn’t say it’s rococo, no,’ Steve agreed.

‘So _that’s_ what it is,’ James said.

Steve didn’t ask.

He brushed his teeth in the second floor men’s communal bathroom and came back to find the lights all the way out, James on his cot with his arm over his face and his eyes inside the crook of his elbow, scars hidden by a round muscle that didn’t know how to be at rest.

That was the dance, all right. And now was the end of it, considering it never had the chance for starting in the first place.

Steve was okay with that. It wasn’t the best thing, his hands still warm, remembering what they’d held. Not just flying over the dash setting coordinates, or ordering supplies, or fixing a smoking engine—but a person this time, somebody made out of skin and flesh and muscle and beneath that, blood and bone. Steve couldn’t put two wires together with some sealant and say, ‘You had a blown fuse, but everything should be ship-shape _now_ , Commander,’ because it wasn’t that simple. Hell, he couldn’t even do it with his own aches and pains.

But that didn’t mean he was going to do nothing. It wasn’t his style, just like it wasn’t James’s style to keep quiet or stay out of sight. If they tried to make that fit it’d be like wearing something they’d shrunk in the wash and nobody would be comfortable.

Steve rubbed the inside of his palm with the fingers of his other hand. The thing about helping somebody else was that it usually meant you gave something up in the process, and for a second he thought his own hands were cramping.

They weren’t. They were doing fine. Everyone was doing fine. His memories of another body were close but saying they were still warm—that was a stretch. Steve got down to the ground to flip the switch on their power strip all the way to off, all the way to dark, and then he made his way past the table, steadying himself on the edge before dropping into bed.

He didn’t bang into anything. He was a good pilot and that included navigating his own body, or so he liked to think. He _did_ pause to touch the wing of the model ship he’d fixed—fixed, just to have James give it away—but it wasn’t his salvage, so he didn’t mind it.

It wasn’t for no reason. Anyway, he figured he hadn’t really done it for James.

The bed was too small, as always. But he was used to that. It meant something that there was a bed at all, though staying this positive for this long took its toll. Eventually, he’d start feeling like a busted aquarium VI that no amount of tinkering with could get back up and running again.

It was a project. Something personal. Steve knew better than anyone that his deal was trying to keep busy, especially when he was thinking too much. It was how he coped with everything, so he might as well get shit done while he was in that mode, that _zone_.

Again—it was something personal. He did it for himself as much as he did it for other people, and he’d finally come to a place where he could accept that as more than just being selfish.

Besides, they’d been selfless enough for a good, long time. Now they needed to lie back, put their head on a lumpy pillow that used to be a supply sack, and get whatever rest they could before early morning noise woke them up.

Steve stuck his hand under an old pocket, making himself as comfortable as he could with what he’d been given. And again—he didn’t mind it.

He was surprised to find he really didn’t.

Sleep would come more easily if he didn’t think about everything, about sitting with Kaidan Alenko and sharing the admissions of silence or sitting with James Vega and sharing the _huevos_. When Steve did fall under, the night would bring its usual dreams—and the knowledge that sometimes the good ones were worse than the bad ones. It had to do with how they compared to waking up, if they were better or worse off when their eyes were closed, _and_ if they knew it.

Steve tried James’s system—putting his arm over his eyes, feeling the weight and the pulse on the bridge of his nose. It made things darker than dark, even if it was only an illusion.

It didn’t make things quiet.

There was a noise that cut straight through the darkness, something rattling, a crash. ‘Fuckin’ table,’ James said.

It wasn’t a part of the dance.

Steve didn’t sit up.

He didn’t lower his arm, either, so that was what James touched first. He cupped his palm against Steve’s elbow; there was nothing rolled over it because Steve wasn’t wearing anything more than his tank and his skivvies to bed, the rest folded up neat on the floor. James was probably stepping on it right now, kneeling on it, bending down next to Steve’s cot, touching his arm. Lowering it from his face.

Steve blinked to clear his vision—but like he’d thought, the darkness was an illusion. Or it was always this dark, this time of night.

James ran his fingers over Steve’s bare arm, from his elbow up to his shoulder, following the natural curve of muscle. Steve remembered doing the same thing in the opposite direction; he remembered how big the muscle was, how it only twitched when Steve’s touch was _real_ light.

‘Hey,’ James said, head bowed again. Steve already knew what the back of his neck felt like _and_ what it looked like, where the bare skin ended and the tattoos began.

James’s thumb stopped at a scar on Steve’s bicep.

‘What’s this from?’ he asked.

‘Nothing too special,’ Steve said, surprised by the quality of his voice. Deep and rough, yeah, but mostly calm. It sounded like he’d been sleeping for a long time, but also like he was ready to be woken up. ‘Just a vaccination. I’ve had it since I was a kid.’

James traced the shape, back and forth, a half-moon curve that didn’t feel anything. But the skin around it—maybe to overcompensate—felt everything at least twice as much, making Steve shiver.

‘You’re not dreaming, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ James said.

‘Maybe it was.’ Steve paused to lick his lips, to keep them from feeling so dry. ‘But don’t flatter yourself _too_ much, Mr. Vega. In my dreams, the _huevos_ are just right.’

‘ _I_ make ‘em just right,’ James said.

He did—but the day his head got as big as his shoulders, there wasn’t going to be any room left for him in the shelter for anybody else.

Steve’s skin prickled from the touch like he was seventeen again, like their world wasn’t on the wrong side of ending, only he knew it wasn’t that. The scar might’ve been something he’d always had but the meaning he’d picked up along the way was a whole lot more—and so the skin he wore wasn’t the same as the skin he’d been born with. It felt things, knew things, understood things it never had before and stopped understanding things it used to, back when it wasn’t so rough, when it hadn’t thickened up to weather everything.

James’s thumb stopped, right up against the scar itself. Steve had just enough room to maneuver, knuckles brushing over James’s cheekbone—where James had a scar of his own, a long, mean one he never talked about.

Steve wasn’t asking him to.

He was just getting the feel of it, something he’d seen every day for a long time now, something he hadn’t ever touched. It was only a scar. But it was James’s scar, one of many, and it stretched all the way from the hollow of his cheek across the bridge of his nose, hooking to the natural shape of the bones it crossed along the way. It reminded Steve of the view of a planet they were scanning, one of those valley ridges or desert storms that wouldn’t clear up, shapes that were almost beautiful—as long as you were observing them from a distance. Down in the thick of it, when you lost perspective, you lost the beauty of it, too.

Steve’s hand moved, mostly on instinct. He found the other scar on the other side of James’s face, on his other cheekbone. That one was so much smaller and it arced in the wrong direction—curving away from Steve’s fingertip instead of around it.

There was another one, on James’s chin, under his mouth. His face was cocky all the time but the scar made it look cocky _and_ badass, like a guy that was challenging you whenever he looked at you, saying, _You wanna make something out of it?_

 _Yeah_ , Steve thought. _I_ do _._

He saved that scar for last, straight and simple and almost clean in a way, from the stubble on James’s jaw to the smooth skin just under his lip to the lip itself. James breathed against Steve’s finger, which rested there instead of going any farther—because that was where the scar ended.

‘What’s this from?’ Steve finally asked.

He could feel James’s jaw working, his mouth moving, when he spoke. ‘Got it on Fehl,’ James said, simple as that. ‘There’s one from a bar fight on Omega, too. I was always getting into those. Fucking Batarians.’

‘Why am I not surprised.’ Steve’s finger was dangerously close to slipping, to going that extra inch they wouldn’t be able to take back. And James was still rubbing his arm, back and forth, the same way Steve tried to fix things—to give his hands something to do as much as it was to hand over a finished product. ‘Don’t tell me you miss it.’

‘Hell yeah I do. And that’s not all I miss.’ James’s hand finally stopped. After that, it didn’t seem to know how to pick up again.

Steve knew how to jumpstart even an M29 Grizzly when it’d stalled out. And he’d always been able to draw the comparisons between the two: raw and unrefined and powerful, a decent make—for the right type of personality. _If_ you could handle it.

Not everybody could.

Steve thought about Alenko, _Kaidan_ , and what he’d said, all the words that stuck worse than bad proteins in a guy’s throat. He thought about how much it sucked to be right, as much as it sucked to be wrong, and how the bad dreams weren’t half as fucked up as the good ones. He thought about James scrambling the eggs and banging into the table on his way across the room, how none of this was part of the dance.

He had to be feeling it—feeling more than Steve’s body.

Steve felt himself grin.

And James must’ve felt that, too. He gave Steve’s arm a squeeze, the only warning there was, except for _everything else_ leading up to it. Steve should have seen the signs, but that was what he always said when he was flying. Should’ve, could’ve, _would have_. ‘Almost’ didn’t matter worth a damn after you’d crashed, now did it? Tell those excuses to the busted parts and the blood and the smoke.

There wasn’t any of that here. James took one of those heavy breaths; Steve could practically feel his chest swelling up with new air in his lungs. Not clean air or fresh air, but it was remarkable what the body could process and turn into something livable, for as long as it wanted to keep going.

They weren’t healing any old wounds. The scar tissue had already formed.

So they knew what they were getting into. For the right type of personality; _if_ they could handle it.

‘ _Son_ of a bitch, Esteban,’ James said.

Steve was saying _I know_ when James kissed him, their mouths open, Steve’s lips on one scar and his nose pressed against another.

He’d already had his hands on James’s shoulders that night but the change in direction made all the difference. He held on where the tendons were straining, James still kneeling on the floor by the cot, Steve still halfway up and halfway down in bed. There was some teeth, but James was mostly if not _all_ about the tongue, swiping it over Steve’s lower lip and pushing it inside his mouth, at one point trying to bite him. He kissed like kissing was a bar fight on Omega with a handful of Batarians cheating at poker and for the time being, that was how it had to be. They didn’t breathe, didn’t remind themselves of the air they were breathing, just the sweat and the skin and the smell of each other, the twist in Steve’s gut when he got closer, neither of them taking their time.

Then, James had to break away to breathe. His workouts weren’t exactly centered around cardio fitness, something Steve wasn’t on him about enough—so all he did was build up muscle mass, build up strength.

Being strong didn’t mean you had stamina. Steve was grinning again at the revelation but James couldn’t see it; if he could feel it in the shifting of Steve’s face while they were still so close, then he didn’t bring it up or ask, _what’s so funny?_ He spent a while catching his breath like slowing down as a concept was new to him—but also like he hated it.

Stopping and starting. Stalling and stalling. And Steve had always known that was the James Vega’s way from the moment he said he actually _liked_ the M29 Grizzly.

Like that summed it all up. Like people were _that_ easy.

Given how long this had taken, it was safe to say by now that James Vega wasn’t _easy_ at all. In fact, he couldn’t be more of anything but.

Steve rubbed the stubble on James’s jaw with the same care James showed for the old vaccination scar on Steve’s arm. Whether or not it helped didn’t matter, because it was all about touching now. James just had to catch his breath, sucking it in quick past his lips, not even pacing himself. The air he pulled into his lungs pulled Steve closer.

‘Is this for fixing your model Normandy?’ Steve asked, voice rasping on something unfamiliar. That was how he sounded when somebody kissed him—it’d been a long time, but the memory hadn’t died. It’d just been keeping quiet for a while. ‘I know how you feel about that ship—I feel the same way—but _still_ …’

‘Don’t—’ James said, like Kaidan had that time back in Piccadilly. _Don’t_. The reasons weren’t the same but Steve still felt like he was the one who’d bumped into the table.

‘Okay. So it’s not about the model ship.’ It hadn’t ever been about the model ship. ‘I hear you, James. I hear you.’

Maybe it wasn’t loud and clear like the saying went, or like James usually pretended to be, but the transmission _had_ come through. Broken up in spots, distorted, confused—and Steve had finally figured it out.

This time, _he_ kissed James. The shift in the balance was only fair, the cot creaking as Steve leaned forward. His palm fit against the tattoo on James’s throat and somewhere beneath that was a hot pulse, obvious and racing. The needles must’ve hurt like hell on the thin skin, the same way all scars hurt like hell at the time; there were some of those you chose and some you couldn’t choose and everybody had to learn, sooner or later, how to wear them.

Sooner wasn’t always better. The wait could be fine—pretty damn fine—too.

Steve took it slow when James hadn’t not because he wasn’t feeling the momentum and the gravity but because holding back made James’s shoulders actually tremble. Big as they were, they shivered from collarbone to bicep and the tendons twitched with the effort it took to move really, really evenly, opening his mouth under Steve’s mouth, not going in too hot and burning up along the way.

 _Time and a place_ , Steve thought. And technically this wasn’t either—but what time did they have except for now? And what place were they going to get?

The past didn’t belong to them. Most of it had been stripped clean away. Some people needed it, the ability to start over working with a blank screen, not so much about the challenge but the freedom of a full system reboot.

Steve realized he wasn’t breathing—that he could pick up old skills after letting them get rusty easily enough, but that there was no teaching yourself how not to feel something. He slid his hands to James’s sleeves, where the seams tugged tight over muscle, and did what he’d wanted without ever putting a name to it, thumbs under the hems where the skin was warm and almost soft. Steve found another scar, tucked above the crook of James’s armpit, and the t-shirt sleeves strained. He felt James’s chest next, which was as hard as it looked or even harder, but not so thick he couldn’t feel James’s heart beating under it all. He rubbed the simple, damp cotton, and somehow knowing there was a naked body under there made the whole thing that much more attractive.

Restraint; finesse. It was something they all had to figure out for themselves. The simplest of gestures had James panting by the end, but the truth was, Steve felt the same way when James rushed him: knocked off his course, like being kicked into space and dragged into orbit at the same time. Falling and flying.

When you thought about it, the principles were basically the same thing.

And dancing didn’t fit in anywhere.

It was what people did to sort out those other forces, fight them or use them. Steve wrapped his arms around the back of James’s neck and the kiss finally ended, somewhere in the corner of James’s mouth, right there over the hook of a scar catching on his bottom lip. Like James had come too close to somebody’s bait and ended up reeled in.

Hadn’t they all.

Steve spent a few seconds in that spot that felt longer than just seconds, his lips pursed against the texture he could feel and the scar tissue James couldn’t, kissing it. He did it over and over until his own eyes opened and he pulled back, glanced up to realize James’s face was totally blank. It wasn’t younger than he ever looked but like he wasn’t trying to prove something anymore, like he’d forgotten how that worked. And without the pretenses, the hard muscle to stand between somebody else’s hand and his heart, all the big stuff made sense.

He was trying not to look small.

Steve had been working too much with _his guys_. He’d been thinking too much about how to help everyone. If he could apply what he’d learned with them to his own life, great—but he wasn’t going to psych James out by trying to get into his head without permission.

So he kissed another scar next, under James’s cheekbone. One from the time back in Fehl, which they hadn’t talked about much, and one from a game of poker gone sour, which made more sense than anything else on the planet. One on either side. Of course, James hadn’t gotten it patched up the way he should have. Of course he’d just let it bleed all the way through the night, without bothering to dab some medigel on it when he saw himself in the mirror the next morning.

Tattoos and scars—they could both be about choice. But if Steve got started on what they wore and what they didn’t, he’d be doing more than just kissing old scars, reminding them what they could and couldn’t feel.

‘You got some kinda fetish I didn’t know about?’ James’s voice was this rough little thing, all balled up like an old bandage somebody had already used.

‘This from the guy who admitted he has a thing for grizzly bears,’ Steve replied.

James coughed, once, maybe on a laugh. When he held Steve’s face he wouldn’t find any scars, only a few of those tight lines under Steve’s cheeks that couldn’t be seen except in certain harsh lighting. ‘You’re the one who said that crazy shit, Esteban. Not me.’

‘Yeah, but you implied it.’ It was Steve’s turn to shiver when he realized James knew exactly where those lines were, even in the dark. ‘I always _did_ have to wonder if you even knew you were flirting.’

At last, James grinned. It was enough to catch the natural light, moon beaming through the haze in the sky and cracking its way in past a high window with two blown out panes. James’s dog-tags twinkled, two of them, double chips that Steve had seen on countless guys. They’d wear them forever, not taking them off, for all the obvious reasons and the less obvious ones.

Steve leaned down and James leaned up and they were finally, finally, kissing each other—and it felt incredible because it felt like something. Steve twisted his hands just below the collar of James’s tee, over his shoulders, grabbing hard, digging his fingers in, and James’s hands were enormous at the back of Steve’s head, at the back of his neck. This time, Steve was the one who might have thought they were in a bar fight, giving what he got and taking what he wanted. If James had been breathing hard before, it was double time now, gasping for air because they weren’t about to pull away again.

Steve’s mind stopped running. He could feel it powering down, the last few flickers before heat and sense—not common sense—and air in his lungs and cloth in his grip, skin beneath his nails, assumed direct control.

Then, the whole ground shook beneath their feet.

Literally.

There was some shouting, not immediate but almost, reaction patterns in case of emergency pretty clearly defined. They ran drills like this sometimes, institution based for now—although Traynor and Allers were working on setting something up London-wide—and Steve told himself that, if this was one of those drills, then he was going to have to start believing in a more cosmic interpretation of coincidence.

‘The hell,’ James said, ‘is going on?’

The obvious joke about rocking his world was too James for the situation. Neither of them brought it up, even though they probably wouldn’t have the chance to do it again.

James moved fast, off the ground and avoiding the table, and Steve didn’t grab his jacket or any of the things he considered his. They had their places to be and a spot to meet after, once they were outside, rounding up residents and getting them to the safety zones. There wasn’t even room in the rhythm to say _See you at the same place_ and _You’d better be there_ because it was implied.

Steve went for Kaidan. James headed to the other half of the bloc. Steve could hear him shouting orders all the way down the hall and he sounded, for a few seconds, just like a commander.

*


	13. VAKARIAN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garrus meets an opportunity face-on. Or face-off.

Opportunities often presented themselves—sometimes _without_ Garrus having to make them.

That wasn’t always the case. If you were an exacting Turian with a specific set of standards, then many times you _did_ have to make them yourself. But there was something to be said for Shepard’s way, skill and talent and determination and the unexpected element of luck. Running into an old friend at the start of a new—arguably _old_ , as well—battle, for example. Always being in the wrong place at the right time. _That_ sort of thing.

It wasn’t something they could teach in schools or on the field. There were no drills for it. It was something you were born with or not, like a dextro-amino based immune system or a handsome pair of mandibles.

If there had been anyone to listen, Garrus would have said: _I’ll take the handsome pair of mandibles_.

There wasn’t anyone to listen.

Across the river that wasn’t, technically, a river any longer, sparks were flying—an explosion of some sort, nothing too big, not on the scale of an entire planet being destroyed, _certainly_ not on the scale of the Reapers doing the destroying. And Garrus could tell from the distance—while the doctors and the nurses didn’t so much _panic_ as they started racing against what they thought was time—that it was a power outage, nothing more than a few simple batteries blowing. As far as crises went, this was an easy one to solve.

They’d all understand it soon enough, at least once their adrenaline stopped pounding.

But it presented Garrus with an opportunity.

Being monitored had its ups and downs. The constant bleeping was unpleasant, to say the least, though Garrus didn’t have to worry about anyone fixing his scars when there just weren’t any of the resources necessary to do so. Those stayed and so did the attention, a few young salarians who truly believed Garrus hadn’t seen worse in his time _and_ moved faster through it.

It wasn’t that he wanted out.

All right—it was _exactly_ that he wanted out.

He had his reasons. Most of them weren’t even worth mentioning. And the power outage—possibly an armory meltdown, given the distant smell and the brief lights show that came before it—was the perfect distraction to slip away unnoticed.

He’d never promised to be a good little patient. Since he was a Turian, he wasn’t a good _little_ anything.

His old armor—what was left of it, rather—had been folded thoughtfully on the floor beside his coat, kept in a neat storage unit. No sign of his weapons there, though Garrus hadn’t been expecting them. Perhaps they were in that armory across the river. The local staff kept his records somewhere else—or rather, they kept Tarquin Victus’s records somewhere else, and Garrus had no attachment to them whatsoever. He had no plan on checking himself in for further treatment, and needed no history to do so.

His face didn’t look fine.

But it didn’t _have_ to.

Some of the patients in the intensive care bloc—those that could still walk, all three of them—had gathered together to, as Shepard once called it, _shoot the shit_. When they saw Garrus leaving, they said nothing to him at all.

 _No shit-shooting with Garrus Vakarian_ , Garrus thought. _Good_.  

‘No evacuation,’ a salarian Garrus recognized was saying from a row nearby, doing a careful sweep of the area. Poor salarian. Little did he know saying _don’t panic_ was the same thing as lighting a fire under a civilian’s ass.

Too bad they hadn’t learned the trick when it came to lighting fires under _council members’_ asses. Telling them they should be panicking hadn’t ever worked.

He was the same salarian who’d told Garrus about Commander Shepard—one hazy morning that stank of burning fuel, an odor that came from the Reapers being melted down and repurposed into something everyone could use.

What a wonderful idea.

‘Commander Shepard,’ the salarian had said. Garrus’s jaw felt more naked than ever from the way he said it, almost as though he was about to whistle, or as though the name comprised the first bar of a popular salarian song. In a way, it did, and for a turian who was worse than bare-faced because he practically had no face at all, there was no hiding any winces. That was why Garrus didn’t wince in the first place. ‘Gone now. Saved us all. Destroyed synthetics—and himself. Great man. Great, great man.’ Then, he bowed his head, twin horns curved inward almost to meeting each other, one more shade of blue-gray among the rest.

The Reapers were obvious. They had fallen where they were, an army of synthetic corpses.

But as for Shepard…

No body had been found. The salarian had confirmed that.

‘No evacuation,’ the salarian kept saying. ‘Remain calm. Prepare for drill! Occupy your stations until further instruction. Repeating: no evacuation; no evacuation.’

Garrus met no one’s eyes on his way out. His legs still worked as legs were supposed to and if it was between that functionality and the aesthetics of his face, he knew which one he’d choose every time.

He was already better at sticking to the shadows than most of his fellow Turians. That didn’t mean he couldn’t see these fellow convalescents in the grips of remembering what had happened to them already, not what was happening to them right now. From their faces alone, some human and some not and all of them unfamiliar, it was obvious they were still seeing explosions far bigger than this one, blasts that actually meant something. They couldn’t help but recall the carnage that had changed their lives, chaos they were currently forced to ask themselves if they should have lived through. And they _probably_ wanted to know if the time they’d borrowed was finally up—if whoever had dealt them in was about to cash in on those credit chits, just like James Vega at the end of a poker round.

 _Why me?_ they must have thought, two parts grateful and one part afraid—a recipe for disaster if you didn’t have the digestive system for it. _Why me and not someone else?_

 _How did_ I _survive this thing, and not_ the _Commander Shepard?_

It was strange to be a piece of something bigger again, not just to recognize the pulse but to _be_ the pulse. That was what Garrus always thought when he and Shepard were reunited after something unpredictable and unlikely kept them apart. They had to stop meeting like that, Shepard once said—but then, the reintroductions were always so much _fun_.

Sometimes you thought a man was dead; sometimes one of you was a vigilante in the teeming Omega underworld; and other times you got it just right, making the perfect entrance, even throwing a bit of the old saunter into your hips before saying hello.

Cool night air touched Garrus’s cheek, the bad one. Drill sirens blared in the distance. So many opportunities presented themselves, old nicknames and new ground to cover. But something rubbed him the wrong way, and it wasn’t just his mutilated right mandible.

Still, he wouldn’t achieve anything by sitting under close observation all day waiting for something that barely approximated a skin-graft to take—and he’d told Shepard before that when it came to rebuilding, he already knew he wasn’t the turian for the job.

Garrus could already see the quickest way out of the field hospital and that was a relief, but before he left he took a detour to find the patient records. Inpatients, outpatients, and anyone DOA with identification. Just a quick peek couldn’t hurt.

Needless to say, with all the commotion, there was no one standing watch over the database.

There were a few old datapads that appeared to be in working order, but many of the records were hand-written. Salarian penmanship was nearly impossible to read—though at least they had the decency to be meticulous about their alphabetization system.

The records showed nearly a hundred John Shepards had passed through the Royal National Theater Memorial Field Hospital alone. Many of them were dead. All of them had bodies.

 _Shepard, John_ after _Shepard, John._

They were the lucky ones. The nameless; the un-chosen.

Garrus had to ask himself the difficult question of why he was doing this—if Shepard’s faith in him had been misplaced; if he was just another fool who refused to let go of the past when it was already gone. Not long gone—the wounds were still fresh, the mandibles still mutilated, the face still incomplete because vital sinew was missing—but obviously _not there anymore_. It was a very well-shaped hole—and still empty space was empty space.

That sense of false hope likely came from previous experiences. Shepard had a habit of dying and death had a habit of making close friends mourn—until Shepard showed up again.

He was the type.

So maybe _that_ was why Garrus was so damn certain Shepard wasn’t actually dead. It couldn’t have been wishful thinking. He’d never been so…positive, in all the complicated definitions of the word.

After a pause, he took one of the datapads. You never could tell what you’d need in the future.

Then, he left the field hospital. There was no door to step through, cool air to cool air, but the line had been drawn—somewhere behind him now.

He felt no sense of freedom. The dark streets were only dark streets and without the thrill of restless, sleepless electricity, there was nothing particularly exciting about them. Dangerous, certainly, for anyone cocky enough to think facing the Reapers in London and surviving meant _shit_ after the fact. The skillsets had nothing to do with one another. The definition of survival was constantly changing, much like the world Garrus found himself confined to.

He wasn’t going to let anyone get _the drop_ on him from a darkened city street—but the point was it might be easier to kill him off that way than face on.

And now, face off.

It was almost enough to make Garrus chuckle—almost. He paused at a crossing without a soul for company, not to look back over his shoulder but to survey the landscape before him. Destruction, destruction everywhere, and a few meager attempts to begin fixing that destruction. He expected nothing more, nothing less. The inhabitants of earth would have done exactly that whether or not Shepard was there to remind them.

They had some chance of making it, then. They were better than the council, which was what made them so…endearing.

Garrus waited for the sounds of more trouble, but the explosive glow from across the river had already long since faded. The street below was solid—though whether or not you could trust _that_ as more than an illusion remained a theory to be tested—without even an aftershock to remind him of the opportunity he’d been given.

Coincidentally, he’d taken it.

The London air smelled terrible. Garrus breathed in deeply and only one nostril flared; the other was already curled back into a determined scar.

Nothing lingered but a trail of old smoke. It came from something that wasn’t burning anymore, though the flames had still been hot when it was doused and covered up.

But there was a smaller scale commotion coming from much closer, more worthy of Garrus’s attention than an imagined city crisis. A group of five—four men and an asari with shoulders and a mouth that reminded Garrus, at least in the shadows, of Aria T’loak—were headed his way, or had been.

He was an unexpected visitor and the sight of him was enough to make them come to a full stop.

Also, they were carrying something among them. Looters, Garrus realized. An age-old profession, not a commendable one, but one of the many constants they could all rely on no matter who the enemy really was.

If he’d had lips, he would have been sure to smile.

‘Shit. The hell is this?’ One of the men up front shifted his grip on their plunder to wipe the sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand.

‘You heard about curfew yet, stranger?’ the asari asked. ‘’Cause right now, you’re breaking it six different ways.’

‘Just taking a pleasant stroll, enjoying the view,’ Garrus replied. ‘And what a view it is. Though…it’s _livelier_ than I expected.’

‘Sure is,’ the asari said. ‘But this is _our_ zone. You come here looking to turn a profit, you have to go through us first.’

Garrus thought about scratching the bad side of his face just to point out the scars—as if that subtle indication of who he might have been, what he might have seen, was anything other than bounced currency here on the streets. Being Archangel hadn’t been one of his finest or proudest moments, but he _had_ learned from it.

At least, he’d learned how to be a stubborn fool without getting himself killed in the process. For however long it lasted.

‘Actually, I was wondering if there was anywhere to find myself a drink,’ Garrus said.

The asari rested one hand on her hip, measuring him in the darkness. Garrus waited. He could be a lot to take in. ‘You don’t _look_ like you have any credit.’

‘I can think of a few ways to make it worthwhile,’ Garrus replied. ‘Besides—I’m really _very_ thirsty.’

The asari snorted. ‘You’ve got a mouth on you, I’ll give you that.’  

‘And not much else left on my face, either,’ Garrus said.

‘Do turians even _have_ balls? the asari asked, shaking her head. ‘If they don’t, seems like _you’ve_ grown a pair since _BD._ ’

‘My,’ Garrus said. ‘ _But_ before I’ve had my drink, I’m afraid you’ll be stuck with nothing more than speculation.’

‘Fine,’ the asari told him after another pause, dropping her hold on the cargo. ‘You boys—bring that back to the usual spot, see how much we can get for it. And you—you’re coming with me. Though I can’t say we have much in the way of turian alcohol, we might be able to find you something that isn’t poison. _If_ you’re good.’

Garrus could feel a breeze against bare bone. ‘I’m feeling _lucky_ ,’ he said.

A few drinks later, the taste didn’t even matter.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ the asari said.

‘It seems we already are,’ Garrus replied.

*


	14. VEGA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James and Steve put out a fire and fix a broken machine.

It was chaos, but at least it wasn’t hell.

The distinction was an instinct. Training as hard as he had, James knew how to tell one from the other, even if it wasn’t easy.

Hell, nothing could be easy. The outage made that obvious, but James never _asked_ for easy—never asked for something he knew he wouldn’t get.

The safe-zones in the shelter were packed full of kids and civilians first, old soldiers in their element barking orders and one of the backup sirens blaring. There’d been one explosion—only one, so with how many they’d seen, it shouldn’t’ve been such a big deal.

But nobody was in the mood to take any chances. They’d come this far, and suddenly James had to realize just how far it actually was.

What they’d left behind. What they sure as shit weren’t about to give up.

It meant something. James grabbed a kid by the waist, swung her around and dropped her into somebody else’s arms—then told her to stand guard, all without breaking time or missing a step.

‘You got that?’ he asked, already on his way to the next zone.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.

He didn’t salute her—but only because she wasn’t a superior officer.  

She saluted him, though.

There were no guarantees, same as always. This could’ve been anything, some new threat they never saw coming or just plain bad luck. Maybe it was nothing but a false alarm. No matter what, James’s adrenaline was spiking for a whole damn galaxy of reasons. He didn’t have a chance to think about what the timing meant or take it personally; he got down one hall and through the next and then he was outside, heading in the right direction off shelter grounds. He had an instinct for that, too. It was called ‘listen to what people are shouting’ and also ‘run the other way from where everyone else is headed.’ Following both landed a guy smack in the hot-seat every time.

In a way, it was a lot like their final hours _BD_. Before the Destruction. Even that placed too much _whatever_ on everything that _wasn’t_ what came after. But it was always going to be separated like that, more than a simple line drawn between, closer to one hell of a great divide.

They didn’t have the Mass Relays anymore. There was no way to jump that kind of distance.

James had to jump—over a pile of rubble and scrap metal they’d been breaking down a couple days ago—still moving in the direction of the generator building, the one place that powered half the damn city’s entire grid.

That seemed to be where all the fuss was coming from.

Also, it was where all the _smoke_ was coming from. And you didn’t need instinct to figure out there wasn’t any smoke without fire. You didn’t need more than a pair of working eyes.

The volunteer post-war militia crew was already halfway through containment and into control, old soldiers working as firemen with water getting passed quick as rain between them, when James arrived at the site. Moments like these, it was easy to fall in line because being _just_ another soldier meant the difference between everybody being okay and everybody being dead. ‘Okay’ always looked better by comparison. In fact, ‘dead’ almost made ‘okay’ look good.

The shouting, the commands, the orders, the efficiency. The sweat. There were other ways to make a guy’s pulse race but this was close to the fastest one: forty other soldiers in the same square area, all of them working toward the same goal at the same time, nobody needing to stop and mourn and hate and hurt and think.

James grabbed a bucket and got started.

Good thing he’d been putting in extra hours working out—although the motives for that were still bothering him. Wanting to forget, wanting to distract one muscle with another, wasn’t exactly the best reason for doing something. At least it got the desired results.

And at least Turians were better at putting out fires than they were at using hammers.

‘The hell happened here, anyway?’ James asked the guy on his right, a turian with face paint so white it looked like bone with all the shadows and the flames at his back.

‘Power surge,’ the turian said. ‘Blew a fuse in the battery and sparked a fire. Fire hit the armory. That’s what they’re saying, anyway.’

‘So basically we’re just the luckiest people on earth.’ James didn’t let the conversation distract him from the rhythm—buckets passed forward from one five-fingered pair of hands to the next three-fingered pair. ‘Shit. We’re the _only_ people on earth.’

‘That’s more like it,’ the turian replied.

Sweat rolled down James’s temple, down the side of his neck, damp at his shoulders and under his arms and in the small of his back. His muscles burned. Water was heavy but it was something to carry, something with purpose, not a shadow or a memory weighing down on him. The difference was…

A difference could be made. Right here, right now. There were reasons, a lot of ‘em, to keep fighting: people back in the shelter who were scared, strangers and acquaintances and even a couple of old friends—and a guy who knew how to kiss like he flew. Reckless. Dangerous. _Talented_. James ground his teeth together, clenching his jaw, and maybe he spilled, maybe a _little_ , but not enough for it to matter.

They were gonna get through this. Compared to how London had burned before, this fire was nothing—and all of them, everyone standing together around the generator, had faced down the Goddamn reapers and _won_.

Sure, it was Shepard they had to thank for it. It was Shepard’s name on every unidentified body in every field hospital from one end of the city to the other. It was Shepard’s face they had on all the memorials and Shepard’s name they all knew—even if it was one some people knew better than others. It was Shepard; it was always going to be Shepard.

But it was also everybody else who had names, lives, futures of their own.

James could barely breathe, only he blamed it on the quality of the air this time and not his lungs. Water and sweat splashed the front of his shirt, staining it gray in the darkness. The fire was already dying, like it’d flared up so bright for the sole purpose of being put out. And it would’ve kept burning without all of them, turians and asari and even krogan, one old lieutenant shouting orders from the high ground, working together to make sure that didn’t happen.

They didn’t need the last bucket in his hands, but James passed it along anyway. Then, fingers and knuckles black with soot from getting so close and arms streaked with the same stuff past the elbows, tattoos that wouldn’t last longer than a shower, he wiped sweat off the side of his face, probably greasing it up in the process.

He could still hear that clear voice bellowing from above, telling the guys to fall in line—to spread out and start looking for any casualties and to do it right, not half-assed. ‘You think you’re lying down on the job now? Get your asses in gear and get out there—and no damn heroics, either!’

James almost grinned, with a huff of breath that reminded him he could breathe, that he was _still_ breathing.

He moved past an asari with some mean looking burns on the side of her face, a turian kneeling next to her with an emergency ration of medigel for them; he moved past a salarian and a krogan lifting a chunk of rubble together and some of the soldiers he played poker with now and then heading down into the generator building to make sure the battery wasn’t fucked. Another group had broken off to check out the armory nearby, all the pieces they’d salvaged and tried to put back together, since you never knew when you were gonna need to defend yourself. It’d happen sooner or later, maybe sooner than later, and they couldn’t afford not to be ready for it.

It wasn’t James’s place to be proud of everybody, proud of himself.

But he thought maybe, if Shepard could’ve seen it, _he_ sure would’ve been.  

They knew what they were doing. They were getting on okay. Volunteer nurses, one of them who Steve called _his asari_ , had shown up to look after the injured, moving fast with portable stretchers and strong arms—strong enough, even if they didn’t spend most of their free time priming the muscle. They understood what they had to lift and they got it done because there was no other choice. They had to.

And there, with the group heading in to check on the generator, was the man himself.

‘The hell’s a guy like you doing in a place like this, Esteban?’ James asked, jogging up close.

‘Are you kidding me, Mr. Vega?’ Steve replied. ‘I come here all the time.’

‘Ooh,’ James said. ‘You got me. Never would’ve guessed it by looking at you. Seems like you’re just livin’ too close to the edge for me.’

‘Yeah.’ Steve almost laughed, but it wasn’t the right place for it. James could see it in his eyes, one bright flash like a signaling beacon. ‘Truth is, I’m here to fix that damn generator. _Again_.’

‘No kidding,’ James said.

The building itself wasn’t too impressive. Most things in London weren’t. Even the places that were still in one piece were all missing something important, nothing making it through without its scars, nothing strong enough to withstand what the reapers showed ‘em—no mercy. That anything was still standing at all meant it was ten times as tough as your average krogan but sometimes just making it through wasn’t enough. Sometimes you had standards and you wanted more. And that wasn’t _necessarily_ a bad thing.

If a commanding officer told you that you were better than what you were giving, it was one of those insult-compliments that meant you had to _do_ better to _be_ better. You couldn’t just sit back and take it easy on possibility.

James nudged the door to the ground level open and Steve stepped inside with the rest of the tech guys, heading for the battery. It was dark but they had flashlights they finally switched on, little beams shooting down the stairs, flaring bright in the darkness. James couldn’t see anybody but he could hear himself breathing. He could hear Steve breathing.

And he stuck close because this was where they needed him. In case anything happened, weakened support beams falling, whatever. It didn’t matter.

James was there and he wasn’t leaving. Maybe he could even hold a couple of things or keep the flashlight steady for Steve to work by.

Steve must’ve been thinking the same thing because a second later he handed his to James and James took it, sweaty in his grip.

‘You bleeding?’ Steve asked.

‘Just sweat,’ James said. ‘This time, anyway.’

Steve made a noise; it sounded satisfied more than relieved. James’s chest filled up with something he had to breathe out a second later, so fast and so sudden—but he didn’t have to ask himself if it’d been there. He knew. He just knew.

‘Try and hold that thing steady,’ Steve said.

‘Holding things is what I _do_ , Esteban.’ James cast one beam of light out in front of him , catching the side of a part whose name he didn’t know and didn’t care to, something sizzling that looked like a good kick or two with the flat of his boot could help it see its way toward working again. ‘Usually they’re a bit heavier than this, though. I _think_ I can handle it.’

‘Just keep it steady,’ Steve repeated. ‘Especially when your arm starts to get tired. This could take a while.’

Voices chased each other around the area, engineers talking back and forth, flashlights swinging until they found their sweet spots. The air was closer than usual and warmer, too, the ceiling low enough that James had to duck his head. Steve knelt down next to this big glowing coil thing that looked damn _hot_ and James kept waiting for him to pull his fingers back with a hiss but he didn’t, navigating the guts of the core without gloves on. He knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was looking for. It was a talent but it was also a skill, something he’d learned from years of practicing and getting it wrong.

Only James didn’t see that part. He saw what it meant now, who Steve was _now_ and what he could do _now_ , which was supposed to be the only thing that counted.

Maybe it wasn’t.

The idea of Steve being younger, making his mistakes, was almost enough for James to shift the flashlight. He caught himself just in time. Steve didn’t notice, muttering to himself about the usual stuff—whatever it was, James didn’t need to know, or comment on _thrusters_ with a chuckle, either. The damn thing worked or it didn’t. And there were people like Steve to make sure it worked more than it didn’t. And there were people like James to cast a big shadow over them, to blow that shadow open with a spotlight when they needed it.

Steve seriously knew what he was doing.

It was _hot_. Not temperature-hot but the other kind, that started on the inside heading out instead of heading in from the outside. James felt it in his stomach first and his chest right after that, not something he was breathing but something in his muscles demanding more air. It took all this other shit with it, heat to match heat, a fire James did and didn’t want to put out.

Too bad he was dealing with it alone.

Sort of.

There was this other guy, on one knee with the other one bent, and he was laughing without warning, like he’d just won something. A bet with himself, maybe. A game he didn’t deal anyone else in for while he was playing. ‘Haha, _hell_ yeah,’ Steve said, holding up both hands. James recognized the gesture. Triumph. ‘Now _that’s_ more like it. This damn thing is trouble—just not more trouble than she’s worth.’ Louder, over the sudden hum he’d kickstarted down there, he added, ‘Check your overheated motors, boys—and maybe we should finally see about getting more coolant in here, huh? If only _somebody’d_ mentioned _something_ like that before, we _might_ not be down here now…’

‘Great,’ one of the other engineers said, with an accent that reminded James of Engineer Donnelly from the Normandy. ‘Like you’re not smug enough already about being right all the time, Cortez.’

‘So long as you don’t conveniently forget you owe me a drink for this one,’ Steve replied.

They were all laughing now, and James realized he was, too, even if it wasn’t his joke. Relief did that. It made the funny things funnier, the not-so-funny things less funny, everything sharpened and scrambled like _huevos_ in the pan. James’s stomach growled and he laughed again, shaking his head, the flashlight beam swinging wide.

It caught Steve for a second, face turned James’s way.

‘What do you say we get the _hell_ outta here, Esteban,’ James said.

‘Finally,’ Steve replied. ‘I was beginning to think you might never ask.’

The way out always felt shorter than the way in. It was just one of those rules James had picked up on so long ago now he couldn’t remember when it was he first got it. The air outside wasn’t exactly fresh but it was good to breathe by comparison, and down the street they could see a few lights going on already, not all that bright so they wouldn’t blow the generator again, but still enough to see by. A cheer went up from the crowd. James could feel the generator humming right there underground.

The engineers passing by clapped Steve on the back as they went, one by one.

‘That the guy who owes you a drink?’ James pointed.

‘I’d say it’s at least…five by now,’ Steve said. ‘But yeah. That’s the guy.’

‘I’m pretty sure I owe you a drink or two, myself.’ James flicked the flashlight off. They didn’t need it anymore, and conservation was one of those things everybody had on their minds these days. ‘Pretty sure _you_ owe me a couple, too. And if that _pendejo_ doesn’t make good, Esteban, I’m gonna—’

Steve wrapped his fingers in James’s dog-tag chain, looping right over the tags themselves, tugging him close until their noses were together and they were breathing together. They didn’t kiss, but they could’ve, and even in the dark with the flashlights off it felt like somebody was shining light on them from above, holding the beam steady.

‘Don’t think the offer isn’t appreciated,’ Steve said. James could feel his lips moving like that. He sounded surprised, happy even, a smile in his voice James didn’t know how to hold onto. ‘It kind of is. But I can take care of myself, Mr. Vega.’

‘You can take care of a lot of things,’ James agreed. ‘Doesn’t mean somebody else can’t take care of you.’

Steve sounded like he was going to laugh but then he didn’t. He didn’t make a sound. He shook his head and spread his fingers out instead of clutching them tighter: over James’s heart and through the fabric of his t-shirt and under those two rectangles of metal.

‘You, too, you know,’ Steve said.

 _Yeah, yeah_ , James thought.

He breathed. Apparently, it was that easy. ‘Fine, fine, _fine_ ,’ he said. ‘If you wanna do my laundry so bad, I won’t stop you.’

When Steve finally laughed, James did too. He put his arms around Steve’s waist and Steve put his arms around James’s shoulders and they held each other for a while, not a part of the plan, not a part of acting orders, until they felt like they could keep moving again. Which they did, starting back for the shelter, now that tonight was already today.

*


	15. ALENKO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan knows the score.

In some ways, panic was a necessary part of keeping cool. Clean, clear. Focused. Sharp. Panic cut through everything else, like a familiar voice calling out orders, and Kaidan knew what to do with it. Acting, reacting—actually, he was good at that.

There were a lot of things he was good at, some he was not-so-good at, but when the alarm sounded—clean, clear and focused—he knew what to do. Get the kids to the safety zones, make sure they knew their drills, make sure they were following protocol. Nobody left behind. Nobody feeling like they didn’t have anyone on their side.

It was just like old times, somebody shouting _Go, go, go_ and Kaidan doing it.

Only it wasn’t the voice he was looking to hear. It was all in his head—which was always giving him trouble—and as much as he knew it, he could still sense the echoes like aftershocks, the second headache the first brought with it.

He wasn’t moving as fast as he used to but that was probably to be expected. A couple of soldiers were carrying the younger kids in their arms but Kaidan couldn’t do that, either, not with _his_ arm the way it was. He could smell something burning—for real, this time, not just somewhere in the past—only he couldn’t haul anything around to put it out.

But there were these kids and none of them was crying. They had their eyes set in front of them and when one tripped, Kaidan bent down fast to steady them.

Words didn’t have to mean more than a touch.

‘On your feet,’ Kaidan said, without choking on it. It came so easy, more natural than breathing. He didn’t add _soldier_ because it wasn’t appropriate for a _kid_ , but it was familiar enough—something the boy had already heard countless times—that it made him steady.

It made them both steady.

Zone seven was jam-packed with refugees, most of them somewhere under the age of fifteen, the rest over the age of sixty. Kaidan remembered being fifteen in one quick burst, like a vanguard’s charge, although it felt like he was seeing somebody else’s life flash before his eyes, not his own. Ex-soldiers dropped their living cargo off on their way past and nobody was injured, save for one little girl with a skinned knee; her eyes were bright with pain but the pain was like the panic, maybe better for the moment because it overrode everything else.

It was a small thing instead of a big thing. It helped.

‘You got this?’ an older guy asked, old enough that he should’ve been part of zone seven. He wasn’t. And Kaidan couldn’t allow himself to be surprised anymore when people were talking to him—checking him up and down, knowing right away what he could and couldn’t do in his shape.

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan said. ‘I got this.’

When he turned back to what he had, supposedly, there were so many people. Maybe they didn’t need him but somebody—already gone—had thought they did.

‘All right,’ Kaidan said. One by one, they all looked his way, after he cleared out something that’d been stuck in his throat. It sounded official, not at all like he’d been choking on it for days. And suddenly, like that, it wasn’t there anymore, as though the panic had been able to excise what peace couldn’t. ‘This isn’t a drill, but we go through it like it is, we _get_ through it like it is. Everybody have their positions down?’

 _Yes, sir_ , the old soldiers said. Some of the kids, too.

Vega’d been spending a little too much time with them, obviously. But it hadn’t rubbed off all bad.

Kaidan checked the last of the stragglers into their zone, getting them situated. Then, after appointing a zone captain, he moved on to zone six and zone five, which could’ve been the same place for how similar the situation was in each. Fire outside, but not too close—and a fire inside, not literally, one they knew how to channel. They knew what they were doing. Kaidan knew what he was doing. It was what he was raised on, order that made sense of his own chaos, that’d helped him get through that messed up childhood way back when. If he’d still been doing all his growing up now…

He had no idea how _that’d_ turn out.

Zone six was fine on its own, in need of an official check to make them all stop holding their breath. Kaidan gave it to them, with the same speech as before, words still fresh enough they weren’t tired out yet. A girl in zone five was missing her brother; Kaidan found him hiding under an old statue down the hall, head tucked between his knees. Actually, it wasn’t the worst idea for when you were separated from everybody else. Just put your hands behind your neck and close your eyes and remember what it meant to breathe. You could do that—alone, with nobody breathing next to you. It came out loud and sometimes raw and pretty lonely, but you could do it.

‘I’ve got you,’ Kaidan said. ‘C’mon, it’s okay. Let’s get you to the zone.’

The boy got to his feet and followed, quiet and fast, not even wide-eyed. He was a pretty good kid and his sister was happy to see him, both of them hugging each other until they realized they were in public and they quit it, although they were still scrubbing their eyes after.

In Zone three, Kaidan ran into Allers, an old recording device in hand, with a pen tucked behind her ear and a streak of soot on her cheek.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Fancy meeting you in a place like this. Feels _weird_ to be out on ‘the front’ with all the old soldiers, huh?’

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan said. ‘It…really does. What’re you doing here?’

‘Covering the story, of course,’ Allers said. ‘…That, and Sam _always_ has to stick her nose into trouble. I’m pretty sure London couldn’t run without her doing all the things she does all the time—but it makes it pretty hard catch some shut-eye, I can tell you that much.’

Kaidan swallowed. Trouble sleeping because of somebody else—he knew how that could be once. ‘Sure, sure. Though…maybe she feels the same way about you.’

‘Gotta hope so.’ Allers flashed a grin. ‘You’ve got this place running better than I’ve ever seen it, though. _That’s_ something.’

‘Not really,’ Kaidan said. ‘It’s all their hard work, not mine.’

‘You sure about that?’ Allers pushed her hair back behind her ear, smudging the soot on her cheek wider in the process. She pushed the button on her recording device and held it up. Maybe she figured Kaidan was ready—or because he wasn’t a convalescent in a hospital bed that he wasn’t still healing. He had no idea what he looked like, no mirror to check in. ‘Care to repeat the statement? Major Kaidan Alenko, helping out at the National Gallery Shelter during the crisis, has _this_ to say about the state of readiness he found the civilians there in.’ Allers paused when Kaidan didn’t say anything, blinking his dry eyes. ‘That’s your cue, Major. And trust me, if it’s not right… I’ll edit it so it sounds like it is.’

‘Thanks,’ Kaidan said. ‘I…think. It’s just… Not anything I’m doing. Everybody knows the drills by now. They’re ready for…pretty much everything.’

‘Not too surprising, considering what _we’ve_ seen,’ Allers added. She didn’t take the recording device down or switch it off again, so Kaidan knew something else was expected of him.

‘They know what they’re doing.’ Kaidan blinked again, twice, clearing the sting of old smoke from his eyes. ‘And you’re right—considering what they’ve seen already, a couple of drills in the night aren’t much of anything. Not to these people. They’ve got this. We’ve got this.’

‘And now you’ve heard it from the man himself: _we’ve got this_.’ Allers let the statement linger, then switched the device off. ‘Thanks for your time, Major. Inspiring words, by the way. And people _always_ like hearing them from somebody who knows how it is. Whether or not you’re actually that somebody… Well. They _think_ you are. That means something, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s something, all right,’ Kaidan agreed.

Allers was still grinning, shoving the device back in her pocket. ‘It’ll make for a great story, even if it was just a busted power generator in the end. Fire hit the armory, armory blew, and it could’ve been real bad if people weren’t expecting bad shit to happen all the time. You been down that way yet, seen what’s up?’ Kaidan showed her his arm. ‘Right. Gotcha. Hope I didn’t just stick my foot in my mouth. _I’m_ used to it, but other people…not so much. You’re looking good, though. _Way_ better than the last time I saw you.’

‘Thanks,’ Kaidan said. ‘I think.’

‘It was a compliment.’ Allers adjusted the strap of a knapsack she was carrying. ‘Don’t be such a _soldier_ and take it for a change. Anyway, I should get going. See if I can round up a few shots to go in the bulletin. Thanks for the inside scoop.’

‘Was that what it was?’ Kaidan asked.

Allers’s grin widened. ‘It was something, all right,’ she said.

Kaidan supposed he deserved that one.

He watched her go this time instead of letting her disappear. It made for a different feeling, actually seeing somebody turn a corner and leave. He knew where she was headed now, probably to the armory, or one of the basement zones, following the story. It wasn’t hard to believe there were so many people in one place as it was to think how bad things could’ve been, how bad they weren’t. But people like Allers got it. They didn’t have to talk themselves into it—they saved that for talking everybody _else_ into it.

Kaidan went back to check on zone seven. Some of the kids there had actually managed to fall asleep, no more explosions to wake them up. It was getting close to dawn, something Kaidan knew because of how time worked and not because there were windows in the safety zones he could watch the sun rising through. All they had were emergency exits, battery-operated light flickering, just enough to see by in the dark. He stared at one sign until his eyes hurt and he was the one reminding himself to blink again.

He needed some fresh air.

Then again, so did everybody else. He wasn’t so different.

Outside, it was surprisingly cool, especially for a city that had almost been on fire—that’d almost been on fire _again_. Guys were finally making their way back to the shelter and Kaidan wondered why nobody talked about the lull after the storm instead of always bringing up the one that came before it.

Those quiet days, close to peaceful, sitting next to somebody in a café and brushing their fingers together over the top of their table with their hands on their way to nowhere in particular.

Kaidan put his head in his one good hand, rubbing the bridge of his nose and testing the sore flesh above his cheekbone.

Sometimes in the night, close to morning, before he rolled out of bed leaving it feeling too empty, Shepard did the same thing for him with a callused thumb. He put it right there where Kaidan was going gray—not premature if you considered how they’d been through hell at least a couple of times, not to mention back again after—and it didn’t make the headache feel any better. How could it? But it made _Kaidan_ feel amazing. His whole life flashing before his eyes, and finally it made sense, at least until he fell back asleep.

But Shepard wasn’t there. Kaidan knew that. He just hadn’t thought about it. Four words, simpler than the three they’d never actually spoken.

The next morning came as pale as Kaidan felt. There was a headcheck at zero eight hundred and Kaidan helped with the count, cross-referencing it with the one he’d made last night. He saw the girl with her banged up knee getting medigel put on it and he saw Steve touch the small of Vega’s back—like any part of that back could be considered small—and once he knew everyone was accounted for, once he’d rounded up a couple of the names on the shelter census that were missing, he left to take a walk.

They were never Steve’s walks. They’d always been Kaidan’s walks.

The smell of burning metal was pretty oppressive. There was never a time when it wasn’t. Kaidan knew it, though, and he was ready for it, breathing it in and letting it fill his lungs. Letting himself breathe it out again after. It came and it went but Kaidan didn’t bother with holding his nose or pretending it wasn’t there, clouding everything, an ash-cover on the ground closer to last night’s ground zero they were just getting a team out to clean up.

No panic anymore. Just silence. Somewhere out there Allers was getting ready for the morning broadcast with a sound-clip Kaidan gave her, almost by accident. She’d tricked him into it.

She was good. He had to give her credit for that.

Kaidan didn’t make it all the way to the generator building and the armory. He switched course halfway there, close to sweating by the time he reached his _real_ destination.

It wasn’t anything special, just one of the countless memorials set up around the city that Steve had always been so careful to keep him away from—and Kaidan had known, and Kaidan had wanted it. Maybe he’d been the one who’d kept away from it all along. They’d always been Kaidan’s walks, after all.

He had some trouble getting down next to it, by the base of an old statue with the statue itself missing. Once they had the time for it—and they would, someday—they were going to build new statues there, to match the name sprayed over the plaque, since whatever had been there in the first place burned off in one of the fires, the metal warped and twisted.

SHEPARD, it said now. Kaidan didn’t touch it. His knee started to hurt, pressed into the busted up sidewalk beneath, which was gritty and uneven and not meant for this—but the pain was better than the panic and he needed it.

‘We knew the score,’ he said. That was never in question. That was something they’d told each other, for all the stuff they hadn’t.

Kaidan touched the gray at his own temple instead, something he’d never get to see happen or tease Shepard about, just a little, on the good days. He bowed his head and the panic, the pain—none of it mattered.

‘Didn’t we, Shepard?’ he asked.

His voice cracked on the end, but at least he’d finally said it, just like it was on the plaque. It hung in the air with the ash, but soon, soon, a wind would come that was strong enough to blow it away.

*


	16. VAKARIAN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garrus makes some bad face jokes and a discovery.

The asari—whose name was Alona—had a small transistor radio, which they sat next to adjusting the frequency, right after Garrus showed her what he could do with a sniper rifle.

‘You’re pretty good,’ she said, leaning back on one arm. The static fizzed and popped, in and out, but there were voices underneath it.

‘I used to be the best on the Citadel,’ Garrus replied. ‘Back when that actually _meant_ something.’

‘Back when there _was_ a Citadel,’ Alona said.

‘Back when,’ Garrus agreed. He even included a fond sigh, because those seemed to go over well with most people and, occasionally, with Asari too.

The one in question snorted, then shrugged. She looked up at the sky, daybreak long behind them, Garrus with a job—of sorts—and a drink—also of sorts. It wasn’t the one he’d wanted to share with anyone and it wasn’t the company he’d planned on, but adaptability was the difference between life and death, after all. Some people thought it was strength and some thought it was cleverness, _perceived_ cleverness in any case, but Shepard had always known it was change itself. And now, earth without him was living that change. But change was the most important factor. You couldn’t expect everyone to look or act or even _be_ the same from year to year.

Sometimes they became a vigilante. Sometimes they lost more face—and not just in the figurative sense.

‘So,’ Alona said. ‘Tell me—mysterious Turian stranger turns up on the night of what was _almost_ city-wide crisis, and I’m supposed to believe you’re not bringing trouble with you?’

‘Who said I wasn’t?’ Garrus asked. ‘Maybe trouble just…moves more _slowly_ these days.’

Alona glanced up at the sky. Across the river, a haze of smog was drawn like a shield protecting the gutted, gunned-out buildings. ‘You keep shooting like that, and you can bring all the trouble you want. So long as you hit it between the eyes every time, I’m not complaining. …But there’s gotta be something you’re looking for. Guys like you are always looking for _something_.’

‘Is ‘the rest of my face’ not answer enough?’ Garrus might have been grinning, but if it couldn’t be felt _or_ seen, did it really count?

He wondered.

‘Not on your life, Victus,’ Alona said.

Garrus followed her line of vision like he was looking through a sight at his target in the distance. There was nothing there beyond smoke curling away, making it harder and harder to focus on an imagined crosshair. ‘It’s not something,’ he said at last. ‘It’s someone.’

‘Always is.’ Alona sighed. ‘Figures. Just don’t let it get to your head.’

‘Or to my face,’ Garrus said.

Alona chuckled at that. ‘You can drop the face jokes ten minutes ago—right about when they stopped being funny.’

Complex as the advice was, it also made sense. Garrus waited in silence—almost silence, the radio snapping and crackling and even popping from time to time—for the broadcast Alona wanted to listen to. Best way to get the news, she said, these days, anyway, was by actually _hearing the news_.

That was a first.

But Garrus wanted to see it—technically, hear it—because that in itself was a nearly unimaginable change. Even if it didn’t last, knowing it was possible would surely carry him through to his long, final turian years.

‘Allers’s broadcast is pretty decent,’ Alona said over the fuzz. ‘She even gets news from the other cities. Some of it’s pretty and some of it isn’t.’

Garrus made another face joke. Alona groaned. The broadcast offered a few pre-recorded interviews from the night before for their consideration, what Garrus had come to understand had a legitimizing effect on the people listening in. A few soldiers, a few refugees, one _very_ earnest little girl, and Major Kaidan Alenko, who’d fought with Shepard during those last days _BD_. ‘You might remember him from my coverage, too,’ Allers’s voice said over the wavelength. ‘That is, if I was still broadcasting back then. Who knows, right?’

‘A couple of drills in the night aren’t much of anything,’ Major Kaidan Alenko agreed, warped and distorted but still him. ‘Not to these people. They’ve got this. We’ve got this.’

‘You heard it here, Londoners,’ Allers concluded. ‘Pretty convincing stuff.’

Alona switched off the radio. ‘Morning at last.’ She stretched her arms above her head, getting up without a groan. Ah, Garrus thought. Youth. ‘Gonna go catch some shut-eye. What about you, Victus? Looking for a drink, looking for a job, looking for someone—you looking for a place to stay, too?’

‘You make it all sound so _difficult_ ,’ Garrus said. ‘I’m working on it.’

‘Suit yourself. _Soldier_.’ Alona saluted him with a grin, then headed off back to her place—over a black market bar full of wretches and fools almost exactly like her. Almost exactly like Garrus, too.

Some things changed too much. Others never changed at all.

Garrus watched the sky alone for some time after that, accepting his stubbornness, his failures, all his shortcomings, and pointedly not imagining what Shepard would have said about them.

 _Looking for someone, huh, Garrus?_ he’d ask, easing himself down where the radio used to be, his voice coming in loud and clear instead of low and muffled. _Come on—you couldn’t think of a better story?_

And Garrus would have to reply, _You know, it was clever enough just coming up with Tarquin Victus_ or _Maybe I lost my sense imagination along with the right side of my face_.

 _The face isn’t so bad,_ Shepard would say. _Now, the attitude… That’s another story._

Garrus sighed. It was close to a laugh, a dry chuckle that no one else could hear. Even he couldn’t hear it, but he knew it was there.

Sometimes, all you had were your instincts. Not even thick turian skin lasted forever.

He left the area sooner than he’d planned, before he had the chance to get too comfortable. There was work to be done—there was always work to be done—and people to impress, strangers to incense, enemies to be made and friends to frustrate. At least it wasn’t _just_ like Omega—and the stakes were so much higher now.

 _Major Kaidan Alenko_ , Garrus thought. That really was something. Perhaps, given time and opportunity and reason, they might just have occasion to meet again.

But only after Garrus was successful.

And not being successful was out of the question.

In the following weeks, Alona said he was the most determined son-of-a-turian she’d ever met. He took it as a compliment, if only because it was one. They cleared out a few small-time smuggling rings trying to get in on her turf—she didn’t overcharge the people who needed her goods most, just the bastards selling them, and Garrus liked that in a cut-throat profiteer.

‘That face of yours,’ Alona said one night, holding up her drink. ‘That not-face of yours. Whatever it is. I’ll drink to it. People see it and they just _know_ they’re in trouble.’

‘It’s true,’ Garrus replied. ‘But how do you think I feel when I look in the mirror?’

They named the bar they operated out of _Archangel_. Strangely, it wasn’t even Garrus’s idea. He didn’t help with putting up the sign—although he _did_ calibrate the neon lighting so that it could glow all night long without using more than their allotted energy quota.

‘A turian of many talents,’ Alona said. ‘…And little face. Yeah, yeah. I _know_. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.’

‘Yet I’ve been told a thousand and one is a popular number.’ Garrus watched her swing her hammer before she put it back into the tool kit. ‘Though for the _life_ of me, I have no idea why.’

The dirty deeds were something to hold onto, easier to grip than a hammer’s shaft. Garrus got into a bit of a jam now and then—he was used to working in groups of three, not two, and that made the style so different, the geometry so particular—but it was nothing he couldn’t get out of again.

In the meantime, Alona’s plentiful resources _were_ helpful.

There was no common census city-wide that could be considered up-to-date, only what records the field hospitals kept, and those were easy enough to access—at least for someone like Alona, who had contacts in every district. The task itself would prove a major undertaking, considering how often those still living died from the injuries they’d sustained while fighting, or in accidents during attempted rebuild. Reaper collapses were about as common as everything _else_ collapsing. The damn power generator in Piccadilly had blown a fuse three times in as many weeks.

And Allers’s broadcasts kept them all informed, what they listened to every morning before getting some shut-eye and what they listened to every night before they headed off to work.

‘And you heard it here first,’ Allers always said. Sometimes, it was even true.

‘Nothing surprises us anymore,’ Major Alenko’s clip-of-the-week ran. ‘I’d say it’s pretty impressive.’

‘So what _are_ you looking for, anyway?’ Alona asked, while Garrus scanned the latest datapad. ‘Or is it all some big secret? I’m not helping you resurrect the Reapers or anything, am I?’

‘Nothing nearly so mundane, I assure you,’ Garrus replied.

Alona folded her arms over her chest.

‘What?’ Garrus said. ‘It wasn’t a face joke.’

‘Guess you’re not gonna tell me, huh?’ Alona dropped her hands to her hips instead, shrugging from shoulders to elbows. ‘Fine. Be your mysterious self. But if you bring hell down on this place, Victus, I’m telling you—’

‘I’ll know what I’m looking for when I find it,’ Garrus said, still distracted by his data sweep.

It didn’t bother him anymore—all the John Shepards and Jane Shepards he saw on the list, the words _deceased_ next to the names, or _critical condition_ , or even _stable_. They weren’t the person he was looking for, though whether or not he was right—that he _would_ know, somehow; as though instinct could be that malleable but also that consistent—remained to be seen.

‘You keep taking care of business, I keep taking care of the records,’ Alona said. ‘Simple as that.’

It was a decent bargain. It worked, and considering more than half of the tech in the city _didn’t_ …

Garrus wasn’t complaining. In fact, perverse as he was often told he could be, he didn’t want it to be easy.

It was late one night—or perhaps early one morning—without a job on the table but a stack of records from Bristol there instead, Alona tinkering with the radio but with no real hope of making it work any better than it already did, especially not the way she was handling her tools, that it happened.

‘Hm,’ Garrus said.

There were always countless John Shepards and Jane Shepards. Sometimes Garrus recognized another name—it was how he’d found outpatient Kenneth Donnelly, for example—brief moments, like lost ammo glittering in the Tuchanka dessert. The probability was low, the unlikelihood high, the odds against everyone almost equally. Donnelly had happened a week or so back and Garrus had no inclination to visit him, just as he had no inclination of heading across the Thames toward Piccadilly, where Major Kaidan Alenko was currently giving exclusives to a very savvy reporter named Diana Allers.

It was good for everyone. They did what they had to, but because of the former’s presence on air, Garrus was therefore surprised to discover _Alenko, Kaidan_ on the Bristol list.

Inpatient. Condition: critical.

‘That a good hm or a bad hm?’ Alona asked.

‘Hm,’ Garrus repeated.

‘Typical,’ Alona said.

‘Naturally.’ Garrus tapped the pad with one finger. The noise echoed all the way through his bones and into his wrist, like static humming before a broadcast. ‘My earth geography needs a bit of a polishing up—so how far would you say we are from Bristol?’

*


	17. CORTEZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and James share a couple of drinks and toast to nothing at all.

Steve wasn’t expecting the _cerveza_.

‘No way,’ he said, while James held the two bottles up, one in each hand. ‘How the _hell_ did you manage _that_?’

‘That information’s classified,’ James said. ‘We’re on a need-to-know basis right now, and you—’

‘—don’t need to know. Yeah, yeah, like I didn’t see that one coming.’ Late afternoon sunlight winked off the condensation and the glass while the alcohol itself, pale gold, glittered inside like a vision from the past. ‘You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Mr. Vega?’

‘Better than what people _usually_ tell me I’m full of,’ James said.

He popped the cap off one of the bottles one-handed, then put it down on the table. The aquarium VI was still there but the model Normandy was gone, and Steve could just picture where it was and _how_ it was: all banged up, loved almost to death in the Piccadilly Memorial Orphanage. Although there was no _real_ way of telling. Chances were, it might get treated with the same awe and reverence as only kids knew how to look after a precious thing, right up until all the love they put into it was too much and it broke anyway.

‘Deep thoughts about the _cerveza_?’ James asked, popping the next cap for himself. He lifted it to his mouth without waiting but before he drank, he paused, glass against his lower lip. His voice blew over the rim, warping and sliding as it went. ‘…Guess we should probably drink to something, huh?’

‘You sure about that?’ Steve picked up his own bottle, slick against his palm. ‘Somehow, I didn’t think you’d be the type.’

But Steve hadn’t thought James would be _his_ type, either.

So it wasn’t like he was the best judge of that. And unlike _some_ people he knew, he was man enough to admit when he’d been wrong about something. Or someone. Or himself, apparently.

There was always that.

There was always possibility, too, for improbability—for two bottles of cool _cerveza_ to drink before dinner, an uncharacteristically quiet moment between two people who didn’t always inspire that kind of calm. Peace, maybe, but tranquility _definitely_ not.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Steve said. ‘I’ve never been one for toasts _or_ rousing speeches.’

‘It’s no big thing,’ James replied. ‘Fine; whatever. Maybe you’re right. To the _cerveza_. Yeah—that has a nice ring to it.’

Steve had to think about it a few seconds longer—it wasn’t exactly instinct and it wasn’t exactly easy, or natural, to know what the right thing to do was in any given situation. If they’d been in a packed bar with the lights strobing and asari dancing with turians out on the floor, then maybe the words would’ve come to them quicker—or they wouldn’t have mattered as much, being drowned out in the end by all the ambient noise.

Now, there was just the usual crowd, knowing there were people everywhere but fortunately, none of them dancing. There wasn’t any of the music, either, unless you counted life’s little rhythms: people clearing their throats and some kids laughing and the sound of krogans chuckling outside, somebody—probably not a turian—hammering away until there was no more light to work by.

James nudged his bottle through the air, clinking its side glass on glass with Steve’s, where it was still lifted.

‘Okay,’ Steve said. ‘To the _cerveza_ , then.’

‘…And to getting a new place,’ James added, almost as an afterthought, right before he drank.

That was the first Steve had heard of it. He lifted a brow, but James’s eyes were already shut, head tilted back while he swallowed. The shadow the bottle cast on his throat made it gleam with flecks of sunlight; Steve could see his tattoo flexing with each gulp and knew, as always, James was showing off.

 _Some people_ , Steve thought. Then, he enjoyed the _cerveza_ , because anything else would’ve been a _crime_.

It wasn’t the best he’d ever had but it was what he was drinking in the moment, and for that reason alone—considering how he’d thought he might never get the chance to again—it was pretty damn good. It had the weight of what it meant behind the brew; knowing James probably would’ve preferred having two bottles to himself instead of just one helped it go down nice and easy. Steve tended to like something with a little more of a kick after, to burn the back of his throat and his eyes, but it was better than anything they’d had in a couple of months. And those felt more like years, the way they were passing and the way the landscape was changing right in front of their eyes.

‘That’s not too bad,’ Steve said, without having to be prompted. He pretended he didn’t see James roll his shoulders out, like that was the same thing as shaking off pride. ‘You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’

‘Now _that_ one I’ve heard before.’ James hid what might’ve been a grin behind the bottle, close to finishing his _cerveza_ off already.

Maybe it was smarter to take these things slow or make them last as long as they could. Or maybe it was smarter to enjoy them while they lasted without putting things off until later. Either way, the _cerveza_ was trying to tell them something. Something about living. Something about being happy.

If you could believe James, it’d always been trying.

‘A new place, huh?’ Steve pushed himself off the chair and only came to a stop when he couldn’t go any farther, when James was right in front of him, sitting on his cot, and their knees were bumping together.

‘Yeah. Sure. There’s bound to be some prime real estate around here, right?’ James watched him, not too close, eyes lifted under his brow. One of his eyebrows was cocked—of course—but Steve could see there was more to it than just being cocky. Everybody had their shields. ‘Something we can get for cheaper than the _cerveza_ , even.’

‘You sure do like sneaking up on a guy,’ Steve said.

‘Uh-uh.’ James shook his head. Steve could also see when the shield flickered, its natural vulnerabilities brought out in force when their knees bumped together a second time. The knuckles of James’s free hand brushed above it, against Steve’s thigh, and even through his fatigues, Steve could feel every second of it. ‘I don’t _come_ with a stealth mode.’

‘Not in your model?’ Steve asked.

James’s bottle was close to being empty. Not half-empty—only a little full. He lifted both arms, somewhere between a shrug and taking over the space they had. Showing it up; showing himself off. One thing was certain—they _did_ need a bigger place. James was a big guy.

‘What does it look like?’ James said.

Steve bent down to put his bottle on the floor, so his chest was level with James’s knees. But that wasn’t right. He couldn’t see everything from that perspective but he _had_ been looking, enjoying the show, for a long time before he ever became a part of it.

He remembered watching James and the Commander fight in the Shuttle Bay. He remembered how they did it, so many punches thrown that weren’t meant to connect in the first place, but it’d all been building toward when they finally did.

Now, unlike James Vega, Steve couldn’t afford to think of living life like fighting with it all the time. There were so many different ways to dance, to stay light on your feet but refuse to accept that everything had to be about missing connections—sometimes, a lot of times, on purpose.

With flying, a pilot had to think in terms of missing connections, too—had to think in terms of not crashing. Steve also remembered when he came down to earth in the Kodiak. He remembered the shuttle spitting fire and smoke the whole way, heart also crashing, right into his ribs.

He touched James’s thigh, rubbing it with his palm. He felt it flex beneath his touch before it tried—valiant, but ultimately unsuccessful—to relax.

‘It looks pretty good from over here, Mr. Vega,’ Steve said. When he straightened up it was only to settle in, right on James’s lap, knees on either side of the cot. Chances were they were going to break it—although, given how well it’d held up from holding _James_ so many nights, who knew? Maybe it was strong enough to take it. ‘From over here, too,’ Steve added, leaning in close.

No connection yet—except he knew the crash had already happened.

James touched the small of his back, but actually, he was keeping Steve steady. And Steve kept him steady, in one place, neither of them moving. Not yet.

‘Gonna bring that table when we go.’ James’s voice had gone quiet. It was how he sounded in the morning, before he was awake all the way, throat rasping, not ready yet to get up and put everything on he needed to face the day. It might’ve been nothing more than an old, sweaty t-shirt and some fatigues, but it made all the difference in the world they had to live in.

‘Just don’t ask me to share a toothbrush,’ Steve said, ‘and we’re cool.’

He laughed, and James’s hands came up to hold his face when they kissed, fingers damp from the _cerveza_ , nothing but skin on skin.

*


	18. EPILOGUE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kaidan's dog-tags were all this time.

He didn’t know his own name, but one of the dog-tags they found on him when they took him in said Kaidan Alenko, Major Kaidan Alenko.

So that was what they called him.

It must have said it on all the charts, whatever they picked up to look at when they came in. He couldn’t see those charts for himself, but he could hear people talking about them. He could hear: _Blink if you can hear us, Major Alenko_.

He could do that.

He blinked.

Soon, they asked him to do more—because they trusted he _could_ do it, and he didn’t want to let them down. He moved his fingers, although his arm was stiff and heavy and the rest of it didn’t move along with them. He’d lie there in place, all the charts with his name on them around him, listening to the air buzz and beep, trying to practice. But only his fingers worked with him.

‘That’s enough for today,’ they told him. One guy in particular stayed behind, fussing with the charts. He was humming.

It was the humming that seemed familiar somehow. It was impossible not to listen, fingers twitching on the cot until they got caught in the sheets.

‘You’ve suffered extensive injury,’ they told him, not humming. ‘But you’re still alive, Major Alenko.’

He knew that. He moved his fingers at night and blinked when they came in to check on him in the morning.

Sleeping wasn’t as easy. He got this feeling he might not open his eyes when they came in again; blinking was over quicker and he was in control of it, in perfect control.

 _Control_. It was a word that seemed familiar somehow, like the humming. Familiar but lonely, like there was supposed to be something more.

‘Too much of your synthetic tissue has been destroyed to regenerate properly,’ they said.

 _Destroy_. He blinked.

Synthetic _. Synthesis_.

‘Move your fingers if you can hear us,’ they said.

He moved his fingers.

They liked that. They wrote something down, buzzing and beeping. And he kept track of the days by counting how many times they came in, three times a day, tapping each time out with his fingers.

It was a long time. He’d suffered extensive injury. But he was still blinking when he heard them ask him to blink.

It was the seventeenth day of still being alive by his fingers’ count. They came in and they always told him to blink when he heard them, so he did that.

‘Major Alenko,’ they said. _Blink if you can hear us._ ‘No, not that. There’s a turian here to see you.’

He moved his fingers.

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Ademska and Mrsloki for holding my hand through much of this. Title taken from 'The Parting Glass,' which I first heard thanks to Askrata on tumblr. 
> 
> _Of all the money e'er I had,  
>  I spent it in good company.  
> And all the harm I've ever done,  
> Alas! it was to none but me.  
> And all I've done for want of wit  
> To mem'ry now I can't recall  
> So fill to me the parting glass  
> Good night and joy be with you all.  
> Oh, all the comrades e'er I had,  
> They're sorry for my going away,  
> And all the sweethearts e'er I had,  
> They'd wish me one more day to stay,  
> But since it falls unto my lot,  
> That I should rise and you should not,  
> I gently rise and softly call,  
> Good night and joy be with you all._


End file.
